“Oh! That’s the way it works? Next time I can take myself up,” Ariel said, as they stepped out into the attic hall. Miss Peters, meticulously closing the sliding door of the cage, remarked, “Oh, the family never use the elevator. Mrs. Weyman has heart disease, you know, and Mr. Hugh put it in for her. Then it’s a convenience in carrying trays up and down, of course. I couldn’t take care of Mrs. Weyman if I had to climb two flights of stairs each meal.” The attic hall, by night, was unromantically lighted by ordinary electric-light bulbs. Ariel regretted the afternoon’s mysterious twilight. But when Miss Peters had opened Grandam’s door, announced Ariel, and gone on her way, leaving them alone together, all the romance of the afternoon poured back, with Grandam added. Curtains of dim flower pattern were drawn across the windows. But they did not give the effect of shutting in the room. They were caressing, as night’s own starry curtains, and they brought distance near. Tall wax candles glimmered their light down on the piano, over the ivory keys and the glossy rosewood, and the dish with the anemones. But the anemones themselves stood up dark in the dusk, their colors lost. At the edge of the area of light shed by the crystal lamp on the bench, across the room, lay Grandam, her head elevated, among her pillows. She was wearing the silver scarf in which Ariel had been discovered by Mrs. Weyman. A chair was drawn up conveniently near to the daybed in preparation for Miss Clare’s visit. But Ariel ignored it, or perhaps did not see it. She went straight to the daybed and sat down on the edge of that, face to face with Grandam. Grandam did not waste words. “Miss Peters says you were up here this afternoon, Ariel, looking for something in my apartment. I have the liveliest curiosity to know what it was.” “I was looking for ‘Noon,’ the painting Hugh bought of my father. I can’t find where they’ve hung it. I couldn’t ask Hugh, since Father himself wouldn’t,—and anyway, he went away the very first day. But after you came to lunch I thought Hugh must have given it to you,—that it would be here. But it isn’t here. Can you tell me where it is? I don’t mind asking you. Father wouldn’t mind.” Pity woke in Grandam’s face. Things she had at different times heard of Ariel and her father and this picture of Hugh’s all suddenly fitted themselves together into a human pattern. She knew a great deal, all at once. She was silent. Ariel, during the silence, noticed that Grandam was not wearing her wig. This was her own hair, cut short, clipping her small head like a knight’s helmet. It was even lovelier than the wig, Ariel thought. What _was_ Grandam? She was not an old lady with heart disease. She was not a grande dame of a civilization outworn. She was not even Ariel’s great-great-great-great-grandmother. Whatever she was, she was a friend of Ariel’s and would have been even more a friend of her father’s, if he had only known her.