panels were left small square
apertures which framed little pictures of the blue spring sky,
slanted across with blooming peach boughs; for there was a large
peach orchard on the east side of the house. Lucina watched these
little pictures, athwart which occasionally a bird flew and raised
them to life. She held her doll primly, and her little work-bag still
dangled from her arm. She would not begin her task of knitting until
her aunt appeared and her visit was fairly in progress.

Over against the south wall stood a clock as tall as a giant man, and
giving in the half-light a strong impression of the presence of one,
to an eye which did not front it. Lucina often turned her head with a
start and looked, to be sure it was only the clock which sent that
long, dark streak athwart her vision. The clock ticked with slow and
solemn majesty. She was sure that sixty of those ticks would make a
minute, and sixty times the sixty an hour, if she could count up to
that and not get lost in such a sea of numbers; but she could not
tell the time of day by the clock hands.

Lucina was a quick-witted child, but seemed in some particulars to
have a strange lack of curiosity, or else an instinct to preserve for
herself an imagination instead of acquiring knowledge. She was either
obstinately or involuntarily ignorant as yet of the method of telling
time, and the hands of the clock were held before its face of mystery
for concealment rather than revelation to her. But she loved to sit
and watch the clock, and she never told her mother what she thought
about it. Directly in front of Lucina, as she sat waiting, hanging
over the mantel-shelf between the east windows, was a great steel
engraving of the Declaration of Independence. Lucina looked at the
cluster of grave men, and was innocently proud and sure that her
father was much finer-looking than any one of them, and, moreover,
doubted irreverently if any one of them could shoot rabbits or catch
fish, or do anything but sign his name with that stiff pen. Lucina
was capable of an agony of faithfulness to her own, but of loyalty in
a broad sense she knew nothing, and never would, having in that
respect the typical capacity only of women.

The east-room door had been left ajar. Presently a soft whisper of
silk could be heard afar off; but before that even a delicate breath
of lavender came floating into the room. Many sweet and subtly
individual odors seemed to dwell in this old house, pr