“I thought I saw some one sitting there when Belle and I passed,” said Katherine.

CHAPTER THIRTEENTH.

In Patricia’s arbor.

“O, how full of briers is this working-day world.”

On this same bright morning when Rosalind for the first time saw the Gilpin place, Celia Fair carried her sewing, a piece of dainty lace work, to the old rustic summer-house.  It made some variety in the monotony of things to sit here where she could lift her eyes now and then, and looking far away across the river to the hills, let them rest on a bit of sunny road that for a little space emerged from the shadow to disappear again on its winding way.

On this stretch, of road the sunshine seemed always to lie warm and bright, and to Celia it brought a sense of restfulness.  Perhaps in some far-off time the sunlight would again lie on her path.

She loved the old place, and the thought that in all probability it would soon pass into the hands of strangers, troubled her.  She had often sat here in Patricia’s Arbor, beside old Thomas Gilpin, and listened to his reminiscences.  She had been a favorite with the old man, all of the tenderness of whose nature had spent itself upon the wife who lived only a brief time; and in Celia’s relationship to her, distant though it was, lay the secret of his regard.

One of her earliest recollections was of taking tea at the Gilpin house in company with Genevieve and Allan Whittredge.  Mild, fair-faced Miss Anne and her grim-visaged, cross-grained brother were a strangely assorted pair.  Celia’s childish soul had been filled with awe on these occasions.  She had difficulty in keeping her seat in the stiff old haircloth chairs, or in crossing the polished floor of the drawing-room without slipping.

At one end of this room stood the ancient spinet, long ago the property of her own great-grandmother, which she was told would some day be hers.  Celia had been proud of this until Miss Anne, displaying her chief treasures, Patricia’s miniature and ring, remarked upon Genevieve’s likeness to her great-aunt.  Genevieve, with the ring on her finger, looked complacently over her shoulder at the long mirror, and Celia was smitten with sudden envy.  A great-grandmother called Saint Cecilia was not half so interesting as a beautiful great-aunt with a romantic love story; and an old and useless spinet not to be compared to a ring like Patricia’s.  That the ring was to be Genevieve’s she never doubted.

Allan had made fun of his sister and treated heirlooms in general with scorn, calling Celia to look at a print of Jonah in knee breeches and shoe buckles, emerging front the mouth of the whale.  Allan always saw the fun in things.

Between those days and the present there was a great gulf fixed.  She had resolutely put away from her all these memories, and to-day she was annoyed that they should return in such force.  They brought only pain to her tired heart.