I had been tranquilly greeted, and had slipped away into a corner behind a table, whence I looked out with some curiosity on the room and on the dwellers with whom my lot was to be cast for a long while to come.  I was a youth shy with the shyness of my age, but, having had a share of rough, hardy life, ruddy of visage and full of that intense desire to know things and people that springs up quickly in those who have lived in country hamlets far from the stir and bustle of city life.

The room I looked upon was strange, the people strange.  On the floor was India matting, red and white in little squares.  A panel of painted white wood-work ran around an octagonal chamber, into which stole silently the evening twilight through open windows and across a long brick-walled garden-space full of roses and Virginia creepers and odorless wisterias.  Between the windows sat a silent, somewhat stately female, dressed in gray silk, with a plain frilled cap about the face, and with long and rather slim arms tightly clad in silk.  Her fingers played at hide-and-seek among some marvelous lace stitches—­evidently a woman whose age had fallen heir to the deft ways of her youth.  Over her against the wall hung a portrait of a girl of twenty, somewhat sober in dress, with what we should call a Martha Washington cap.  It was a pleasant face, unstirred by any touch of fate, with calm blue eyes awaiting the future.

The hostess saw, I fancied, my set gaze, and rising came toward me as if minded to put at ease the new-comer.  “Thee does not know our friends?” she said.  “Let me make thee known to them.”

I rose quickly and said, “I shall be most glad.”

We went over toward the dame between the windows.  “Mother,” she said, raising her voice, “this is our new friend, Henry Shelburne, from New England.”

As she spoke I saw the old lady stir and move, and after a moment she said, “Has he a four-leaved clover?”

“Always that is what she says.  Thee will get used to it in time.”

“We all do,” said a voice at my elbow; and turning I saw a man of about thirty years, dressed in the plainest-cut Quaker clothes, but with a contradiction to every tenet of Fox written on his face, where a brow of gravity for ever read the riot act to eyes that twinkled with ill-repressed mirth.  When I came to know him well, and saw the preternatural calm of his too quiet lips, I used to imagine that unseen little demons of ready laughter were for ever twitching at their corners.

“Mother is very old,” said my hostess.

“Awfully old,” said my male friend, whose name proved to be Richard Wholesome.

“Thee might think it sad to see one whose whole language has come to be just these words, but sometimes she will be glad and say, ’Has thee a four-leaved clover?’ and sometimes she will be ready to cry, and will say only the same words.  But if thee were to say, ’Have a cup of coffee?’ she would but answer, ‘Has thee a four-leaved clover?’ Does it not seem strange to thee, and sad?  We are used to it, as it might be—­quite used to it.  And that above her is her picture as a girl.”