“Father,” Rosalind asked abruptly, “why was it you did not come to Friendship for so many years?  Did not grandmamma like my mother?  I think I ought to know.”

Mr. Whittredge smiled at the womanly seriousness of the lifted face.  “I think you ought, dear,” he answered.

With her hand clasped in his he told her the story briefly, for even now he could not dwell upon it without pain, and as Rosalind listened she discovered that she had already heard a bit of it from Mrs. Parton and Mrs. Molesworth at the auction.

“We must try, you and I, not to think too hardly of grandmamma now.  She has suffered a great deal, and it was your mother’s earnest wish that the trouble might be healed if the opportunity ever came.”  Patterson said nothing of his own struggle to forgive his mother’s attitude toward his young wife.

“I think, father,” Rosalind said, “that perhaps grandmamma is sorry.  One day, not long ago, I saw her looking at mother’s picture.  She did not know I was there.  She took it from the table and held it in her hand, and I am sure she was crying a little.”

That was a happy day, for now they put aside sad memories, and turned to the merry side of life, Rosalind kept forgetting that her father had been in Friendship before, and continued to point out objects of interest with which he had been familiar long before she was born.  So full were the hours that it was growing dusk when they turned into Church Lane to call on the magician.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINTH.

AT THE MAGICIAN’S.

“I would have you.”

Over his work these days the magician often smiled.  It seemed to him that the good in things was beginning to show very plainly.  The atmosphere of Friendship was clearing; the trouble which had first shown itself when Patterson Whittredge left his home had begun to lift with the coming of his daughter.  Not that Rosalind had anything to do with it; it was only one of those bits of poetical justice that go to make life interesting.

An onlooker might have observed that he smiled oftener when engaged on the spinet than at other times; but if the magician had made any more discoveries in connection with it, he kept them to himself.

Now that the days were growing chill, a cheerful fire blazed on his hearth, before which Crisscross and Curly Q. dozed; he had found time to renew the motto over the chimney-piece, and the window-shelf was full of plants.  The Arden Foresters appeared to regard the place as a club-room for their special benefit, and dropped in at all hours.  The magician liked to have them there.  As he sandpapered and oiled and polished, it was pleasant to glance in, now and then, at the open door, at a row of bright faces in the chimney-corner.

Once in a while Celia joined them for a few minutes.  She wanted to know about the purchaser of the spinet, but Morgan seemed inclined to evade her questions.  He did not deny that there was a purchaser, but the name had apparently escaped him.