held her, something returned to it that had been
driven away perhaps by Miss Pinckney's cheerful and practical presence,
the faint odour of lavender still clung to the air, and the silence was
unbroken except for a faint stirring of the window curtains now and then
to the breeze from outside. Everything was, indeed, just as it had been
left, the toilet tidies and all the quaint contraptions of the '50's and
'60's in their places. On the wall opposite the bed hung several water
colours evidently the work of that immature artist Mary Mascarene, a watch
pocket hung above the bed, a thing embroidered with blue roses, enough to
disturb the sleep of any aesthete, yet beautiful enough in those old days.
There was only one stain mark in the scrupulous cleanliness and neatness
of the place--a panel by the window, once white painted but now dingy-grey
and scored with lines. Phyl got up and inspected it more closely.
Children's heights had evidently been measured here. There was a scale of
feet marked in pencil, initials, and dates. Here was "M. M.," probably
Mary Mascarene, "2 ft. 6 inches. Nineteen months," and the date "April,
1845," and again a year later, "M. M. 2 ft. 9-1/2 inches, May, 1846." So
she had grown three and a half inches in a year. "J. M."--Juliet without
doubt--"3 feet, 3 years old, 1845." Juliet was evidently the elder--so it
went on right into the early '60's, mixed here and there with other
initials, amongst which Phyl made out "J. J." and "R. P.," children maybe
staying at the house and measured against the Mascarene children--children
now old men and women, possibly not even that. It was in the kindly spirit
of Vernons not to pass a painter's brush over these scratchings, records
of the height of a child that lingered only in the memory of the old
house.

Phyl turned from them to the bookshelf and the books it contained. "Noble
Deeds of American Women," "Precept on Precept," "The Dairyman's Daughter,"
and the "New England Primer"--with a mark against the verses left "by John
Rogers to his wife and nine small children, and one at the breast, when he
was burned at the stake at Smithfield in 1555." There were also books of
poetry, Bryant, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "Powhatan, a metrical romance
in seven cantos by Seba Smith," and several others.

Phyl did something characteristic. She gathered every single book into a
pile in her arms and sat down on the floor with them to have a feast. This
devourer of book