They were sitting in the parlor of the Tremont House that morning with the sun streaming in the windows, waiting for Ephraim.

“Uncle Jethro,” Cynthia asked, abruptly, “did you ever know my mother?”

Jethro started, and looked at her quickly.

“W-why, Cynthy?” he asked.

“Because she grew up in Coniston,” answered Cynthia.  “I never thought of it before, but of course you must have known her.”

“Yes, I knew her,” he said.

“Did you know her well?” she persisted.

Jethro got up and went over to the window, where he stood with his back toward her.

“Yes, Cynthy,” he answered at length.

“Why haven’t you ever told me about her?” asked Cynthia.  How was she to know that her innocent questions tortured him cruelly; that the spirit of the Cynthia who had come to him in the tannery house had haunted him all his life, and that she herself, a new Cynthia, was still that spirit?  The bygone Cynthia had been much in his thoughts since they came to Boston.

“What was she like?”

“She—­she was like you, Cynthy,” he said, but he did not turn round.  “She was a clever woman, and a good woman, and—­a lady, Cynthy.”

The girl said nothing for a while, but she tingled with pleasure because Jethro had compared her to her mother.  She determined to try to be like that, if he thought her so.

“Uncle Jethro,” she said presently, “I’d like to go to see the house where she lived.”

“Er—­Ephraim knows it,” said Jethro.

So when Ephraim came the three went over the hill; past the State House which Bulfinch set as a crown on the crest of it looking over the sweep of the Common, and on into the maze of quaint, old-world streets on the slope beyond:  streets with white porticos, and violet panes in the windows.  They came to an old square hidden away on a terrace of the hill, and after that the streets grew narrower and dingier.  Ephraim, whose memory never betrayed him, hobbled up to a shabby house in the middle of one of these blocks and rang the bell.

“Here’s where I found Will when I come back from the war,” he said, and explained the matter in full to the slatternly landlady who came to the door.  She was a good-natured woman, who thought her boarder would not mind, and led the way up the steep stairs to the chamber over the roofs where Wetherell and Cynthia had lived and hoped and worked together; where he had written those pages by which, with the aid of her loving criticism, he had thought to become famous.  The room was as bare now as it had been then, and Ephraim, poking his stick through a hole in the carpet, ventured the assertion that even that had not been changed.  Jethro, staring out over the chimney tops, passed his hand across his eyes.  Cynthia Ware had come to this!

“I found him right here in that bed,” Ephraim was saying, and he poked the bottom boards, too.  “The same bed.  Had a shack when I saw him.  Callate he wouldn’t have lived two months if the war hadn’t bust up and I hadn’t come along.”