.

She drew from the past those salient recollections of Arthur and his
mother: first, the day the two had called regarding the purchase of a
house that her father had just put on the market,--a rambling old
colonial affair, her own mother's birth-place. Sixteen: she had not
quite been that, just free from her school-days in Italy. With the
grand air of youth she had betrayed the fact almost instantly, while
waiting for her father to come into the livingroom.

"Italy!" said Arthur's mother, whom Elsa mentally adopted at once. The
stranger spoke a single phrase, which Elsa answered in excellent if
formal Italian. This led from one question to another. Mrs. Ellison
turned out to be a schoolmate of her mother's, and she, Elsa, had
inherited their very room. What more was needed?

The Ellisons bought the house and lived quietly within it. Society,
and there was a good deal of it in that small Kentuckian city, society
waited for them to approach and apply for admittance, but waited in
vain. Mrs. Ellison never went anywhere. Her son Arthur was a student
and preferred his books. So eventually society introduced itself.
Persons who ignored it must be interesting. When it became known that
Mrs. Ellison had been the schoolmate of the beautiful and aristocratic
wife of General Chetwood; when the local banker quietly spread the
information that the Ellisons were comfortably supplied with stocks and
bonds of a high order, society concluded that it could do very well
without past history. That could come later.

When her father died, Elsa became as much at home in the Ellison house
as in her own. But never, never anywhere in the house, was there
indication of the existence of a brother, so like Arthur that under
normal conditions it would have been difficult to tell them apart.
Even when she used to go up to the garret with Mrs. Ellison, to aid her
in rummaging some old trunk, there came to light none of those trifling
knickknacks which any mother would have secretly clung to, no matter to
what depth her flesh and blood had fallen. Never had she seen among
the usual amateur photographs one presenting two boys. Once she had
come across a photograph of a smooth-faced youth who was in the act of
squinting along the top of an engineer's tripod. Arthur had laughingly
taken it away from her, saying that it represented him when he had had
ambitions to build bridges.

To build bridges. The phrase awoke something in Elsa