"I've seen that dogwood one he carries about with him," Matilda answered, leaning back on her pillow. "It gives me the creeps. Times are when I fancy there is a ghost of a girl face in the flowers. Sandy laughs at me--but I've caught the sight more than once in certain lights and its real upsetting." "Well, I want that he should take all the art in that he's capable of digesting, and I want you to see mountains and what not that you've hungered after all your days and I want to see--Paris!" "It's a real outlandish city for morals, Levi." "Well, it will make me glad to get back to Boston, Matilda," Levi chuckled. "Now lie down and try to sleep." "I feel real drowsy, Levi. My! how much I have got to be grateful for. You are a good man, brother. Time was when I feared success might harden you." Levi did not rest well that night. Alone in his prim, old-fashioned chamber he lay and made plans for the future. "And after we come back," he thought, "I'm going to send Sandy up to the hills with blank checks in his pocket. I'm going to see what he can do in the way of redeeming Lost Hollow. He'll never be happy away from that God-forsaken place--it's in his soul and system. There's that land, too, I bought seven years ago! That oughtn't to be lying fallow." Then his roving thoughts settled on his sister. "Matilda must consent to more help here in the house--she looks peaked." A sharp pang brought him to an upright position. He seemed to be beside lonely Sandy as he had stood that very day by an obscure grave--somewhere in a shabby little graveyard. "Matilda has been one sister in ten thousand and she's asked precious little. Caroline got things quite naturally while she lived at home--'Tilda took the leavings always and patched, somehow, a thankful, beautiful life out of them. She's going to get whole pieces of cloth from now----" he muttered, "with Sandy thrown in." CHAPTER XVII Perhaps it was the spring air; perhaps it was the turn in the tide of Cynthia Walden's life, but whatever it was it roused her and gripped her from early morning. At six o'clock on that May day she awoke in her shabby room of Stoneledge and looked out of the vine-covered window, heard a bird sing a wild, delicious little song, and then sat up with the strange thrill of happiness flooding her heart and soul. It was a warm morning, more like late June than late May, and both the bird and the girl felt the joy in the promise of summer. At nineteen Cynthia, like the spring morn, bore the mark of her coming fulfillment of beauty. She was very lovely, tall, slim, slightly bending, like a reed that had bowed to the wind instead of resisting. The child look, full of question and waiting, was still in her clear blue-gray eyes; the well-formed mouth had not forgotten its pretty, slow smile, and the pale, exquisite whiteness of the smooth skin was touched with a delicate tan and colour that did credit totally Taber's care and culinary art.