“I am Janet Gordon,” said the woman stiffly.

“Then I wish to talk with you and your brother.”

“Come in.”

She stepped aside and motioned him to a low brown door opening on the right.

“Go in and sit down.  I’ll call Thomas,” she said coldly, as she walked out through the hall.

Eric walked into the parlour and sat down as bidden.  He found himself in the most old-fashioned room he had ever seen.  The solidly made chairs and tables, of some wood grown dark and polished with age, made even Mrs. Williamson’s “parlour set” of horsehair seem extravagantly modern by contrast.  The painted floor was covered with round braided rugs.  On the centre table was a lamp, a Bible and some theological volumes contemporary with the square-runged furniture.  The walls, wainscoted half way up in wood and covered for the rest with a dark, diamond-patterned paper, were hung with faded engravings, mostly of clerical-looking, bewigged personages in gowns and bands.

But over the high, undecorated black mantel-piece, in a ruddy glow of sunset light striking through the window, hung one which caught and held Eric’s attention to the exclusion of everything else.  It was the enlarged “crayon” photograph of a young girl, and, in spite of the crudity of execution, it was easily the center of interest in the room.

Eric at once guessed that this must be the picture of Margaret Gordon, for, although quite unlike Kilmeny’s sensitive, spirited face in general, there was a subtle, unmistakable resemblance about brow and chin.

The pictured face was a very handsome one, suggestive of velvety dark eyes and vivid colouring; but it was its expression rather than its beauty which fascinated Eric.  Never had he seen a countenance indicative of more intense and stubborn will power.  Margaret Gordon was dead and buried; the picture was a cheap and inartistic production in an impossible frame of gilt and plush; yet the vitality in that face dominated its surroundings still.  What then must have been the power of such a personality in life?

Eric realized that this woman could and would have done whatsoever she willed, unflinchingly and unrelentingly.  She could stamp her desire on everything and everybody about her, moulding them to her wish and will, in their own despite and in defiance of all the resistance they might make.  Many things in Kilmeny’s upbringing and temperament became clear to him.

“If that woman had told me I was ugly I should have believed her,” he thought.  “Ay, even though I had a mirror to contradict her.  I should never have dreamed of disputing or questioning anything she might have said.  The strange power in her face is almost uncanny, peering out as it does from a mask of beauty and youthful curves.  Pride and stubbornness are its salient characteristics.  Well, Kilmeny does not at all resemble her mother in expression and only very slightly in feature.”