Half-way down this stairway, on the landing, there is a large portrait of my father. Amid all the preparations going on in the house I had not known that Edith had had the electricians adjust a row of shielded electric lights at the top of the heavy frame of Father's picture. The portrait had always hung on the landing where the light is very dim. We had had it for years. It was painted when we were prosperous, but I had never examined it very closely. It was an awfully black sort of picture, and before Ruth's tea I could not have definitely said whether Father was standing or sitting in it. I didn't know that a row of lights could make such a difference. As I turned on the landing that night and came suddenly upon the painting I stopped stock-still. Why, it wasn't a picture! I didn't see the frame, nor the canvas, nor the paint. It was Father, dear Father himself, sitting at his roll-top desk down in the sitting-room. I could see every little wrinkle in his face, the crows-feet at the corners of his eyes, the fine, tired-looking lines along his forehead. He was sitting in his big leather armchair, and I remembered exactly how the leather had worn brown and velvety like that, along the edges. As usual he wore across his breast his heavy gold watch-chain, with the black onyx fob--the one he used to let me play with in church, when I was very little--and in one hand, which was resting easily along the arm of the chair, Father held his glasses just as he used to hold them when he took them off to glance up at me before I dashed off to dancing-school on Saturday nights. "Can't you keep that hair a little smoother?" he'd say to me, and "Isn't there a good deal of trimming on that dress? Your mother always wore plain things with a little white at her neck. Keep your tastes simple, my girl, and your clothes neat and nicely sewed." They were plain, homely words. Any man could say them, but as I remembered them that night, they seemed terribly sweet--almost sacred--and I backed up against the wall, and stared at Father there before me, with tears in my eyes. He would not have liked the sparkling wings I was wearing in my hair. The dress that Edith had given me--all shining satin, wasn't like my mother's with a little white at the neck. The silent, sad expression in my father's eyes smote me. He was gazing straight at me, down into my heart. I almost saw his lips move. The words of the verse that he used to repeat so often at our morning prayers after breakfast, I seemed to hear again: "Children, how hard it is for them that trust in riches to enter into the Kingdom of God." Father was always quoting things from the Bible about vanity and riches. His heroes were always big, simple, honest men like Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin. As I stood and stared at Father's picture the musicians began to play some soft, dreamy melody, and just then Alec from above caught sight of me leaning up against the wall.