A gable of the Lowrie house, with a dignified white door, a fanlight of faintly iridescent glass and polished brasses, faced the brick sidewalk, while to the left there was a high board fence and an entrance with a small grille open on a somber reach of garden. A maid in a stiff white cap answered the fall of the knocker; she took Linda's bag; and, in a hall that impressed her by its bareness, Linda was greeted by the Miss Lowrie she had seen. Her aunt was composed, but there was a perceptible flush on her cheeks, and she said in a rapid voice, after a conventional welcome, “You must meet Elouise at once, before you go up to your room.” Elouise Lowrie was older than Amelia, but she, too, was slender and erect, with black hair startling in its density on her wasted countenance. Linda noticed a fine ruby on a crooked finger and beautiful rose point lace. “It was good of you,” the elder proceeded, “to come and see two old women. I don't know whether we have more to say or to keep still about. But I, for one, am going to avoid explanations. You are here, a fool could see that you were Bartram's girl, and that is enough for a Lowrie.” The room was nearly as bare as the hall: in place of the deep carpets of the Feldts' the floor, of dark uneven oak boards, was merely waxed and covered by a rough-looking oval rug. The walls were paneled in white, with white ruffled curtains at small windows; and the furniture, the dull mahogany ranged against the immaculate paint, the rocking-chairs of high slatted walnut and rush bottoms, the slender formality of tables with fluted legs, was dignified but austere. There were some portraits in heavy old gilt--men with florid faces and tied hair, and the delicate replicas of high-breasted women in brocades. There was, plainly, an air of the exceptional in Amelia Lowrie's conduction of Linda to her room. She waited at the door while the other moved forward to the center of a chamber empty of all the luxury Linda had grown to demand. There was a bed with tall graceful posts supporting a canopy like a frosting of sugar, a solemn set of drawers with a diminutive framed mirror in which she could barely see her shoulders, a small unenclosed brass clock with long exposed weights, and two uninviting painted wooden chairs. This was not, although very nearly, all. Linda's attention was attracted by a framed and long-faded photograph of a young man, bareheaded, with a loosely knotted scarf, a striped blazer and white flannels. His face was thin and sensitive, his lips level, and his eyes gazed with a steady questioning at the observer. “That was Bartram,” Amelia Lowrie told her; “your father. This was his room.”