The Rich Mrs Burgoyne | Page 9

and faded, and littered now with fallen leaves and
twigs.
Barry opened the front door with some difficulty, and they stepped into
the musty emptiness of the big main hall. There was a stairway at the
back of the house with a colored glass window on the landing, and
through it the sunlight streamed, showing the old velvet carpet in the
hall below, and the carved heavy walnut chairs and tables, and the old
engravings in their frames of oak and walnut mosaic. The visitors
peeped into the old library, odorous of unopened books, and with great
curtains of green rep shutting out the light, and into the music room
behind it, cold even on this warm day, with a muffled grand piano
drawn free of the walls, and near it two piano-stools, upholstered in
blue-fringed rep, to match the curtains and chairs. They went across the
hall to the long, dim drawing room, where there was another velvet
carpet, dulled to a red pink by time, and muffled pompous sofas and
chairs, and great mirrors, and "sets" of candlesticks and vases on the
mantels and what-nots. The windows were shuttered here, the air
lifeless. Barry, in George Carew's interest, felt bound to say that "they
would clear all this up, you know; a lot of this stuff could be stored."

"Oh, why store it? It's perfectly good," the lady answered absently.
Presently they went out to the more cheerful dining-room, which ran
straight across the house, and was low-ceiled, with pleasant square-
paned windows on two sides.
"This was the old house," explained Barry; "they added on the front
part. You could do a lot with this room."
"Do you still smell spice, and apples, and cider here?" said Mrs.
Burgoyne, turning from an investigation of the china-closet, with a
radiant face. A moment later she caught her breath suddenly, and
walked across the room to stand, resting her hands on a chair back,
before a large portrait that hung above the fireplace. She stood so,
gazing at the picture--the portrait of a woman--for a full minute, and
when she turned again to Barry, her eyes were bright with tears.
"That's Mrs. Holly," said she. "Emily said that picture was here." And
turning back to the canvas, she added under her breath, "You darling!"
"Did you know her?" Barry asked, surprised.
"Did I know her!" Mrs. Burgoyne echoed softly, without turning. "Yes,
I knew her," she added, almost musingly. And then suddenly she said,
"Come, let's look upstairs," and led the way by the twisted sunny back
stairway, which had a window on every landing and Crimson Rambler
roses pressing against every window. They looked into several
bedrooms, all dusty, close, sunshiny. In the largest of these, a big front
corner room, carpeted in dark red, with a black marble fireplace and an
immense walnut bed, Mrs. Burgoyne, looking through a window that
she had opened upon the lovely panorama of river and woods, said
suddenly:
"This must be my room, it was hers. She was the best friend, in one
way, that I ever had--Mrs. Holly. How happy I was here!"
"Here?" Barry echoed.

At his tone she turned, and looked keenly at him, a little smile playing
about her lips. Then her face suddenly brightened.
"Barry, of course!" she exclaimed. "I KNEW I knew you, but the 'Mr.
Valentine' confused me." And facing him radiantly, she demanded,
"Who am I?"
Barry shook his head slowly, his puzzled, smiling eyes on hers. For a
moment they faced each other; then his look cleared as hers had done,
and their hands met as he said boyishly:
"Well, I will be hanged! Jappy Frothingham!"
"Jappy Frothingham!" she echoed joyously. "But I haven't heard that
name for twenty years. And you're the boy whose father was a doctor,
and who helped us build our Indian camp, and who had the frog, and
fell off the roof, and killed the rattlesnake."
"And you're the girl from Washington who could speak French, and
who put that stuff on my freckles and wouldn't let 'em drown the
kittens."
"Oh, yes, yes!" she said, and, their hands still joined, they laughed like
happy children together.
Presently, more gravely, she told him a little of herself, of the early
marriage, and the diplomat husband whose career was so cruelly cut
short by years of hopeless invalidism. Then had come her father's
illness, and years of travel with him, and now she and the little girls
were alone. And in return Barry sketched his own life, told her a little
of Hetty, and his unhappy days in New York, and of the boy, and
finally of the Mail. Her absorbed attention followed him from point to
point.
"And you say that this Rogers owns the newspaper?" she asked
thoughtfully,