She went down almost immediately and left Linda, in a maze of dim emotions, seated on one of the uncomfortable painted chairs. Her father! This was his room; nothing, she realized, had been disturbed. The mirror had held the vaguely unsteady reflection of his face; he had slept under the arched canopy of the bed. She rose and went to a window from which he, too, had looked. Below her was the garden shut in on its front by the high fence. There was a magnolia-tree, now covered with thick smooth white flowers, and, at the back, low-massed rhododendron with fragile lavender blossoms on a dark glossy foliage. But the space was mainly green and shadowed in tone; while beyond were other gardens, other emerald lawns and magnolia-trees, an ordered succession of tranquillity with separate brick or stone or white dwellings in the lengthening afternoon shadows of vivid maples. It was as different as possible from all that Linda had known, from the elaborate hotels and gigantic apartment houses, the tropical interiors, of her New York life. She unpacked her bag, putting her gold toilet things on the chest of drawers, precisely arranging in a shallow closet what clothes she had brought, and then, changing, went down to the Lowries. They surveyed her with eminent approval at a dinner-table lighted only with candles, beside long windows open on a dusk with a glimmer of fireflies. Suddenly Linda felt amazingly at ease; it seemed to her that she had sat here before, with the night flowing gently in over the candle-flames. The conversation, she discovered, never strayed far from the concerns and importance of the Lowrie blood. “My grandmother, Natalie Vigné,” Elouise informed her, “came with her father to Philadelphia from France, in eighteen hundred and one, at the invitation of Stephen Girard, who was French as well. She married Hallet Lowrie whose mother was a Bartram. “That, my dear, explains our black hair and good figgers. There never was a lumpy Lowrie. Well, Hallet built this house, or rather enlarged it, for his wife; and it has never been out of the family. Our nephew, Arnaud Hallet--Arnaud was old Vigné's name--owns it now. Isaac Hallet, you may recall, was suspected of being a Tory; at any rate his brother's descendants, Fanny Rodwell is the only one left, won't speak.” The placid conversation ran on unchanged throughout dinner and the evening. Linda was relieved by the absence of any questioning; indeed nothing contemporary, she realized, was held to be significant. “I thought Arnaud would be in to-night,” Elouise Lowrie said; “he knew Linda was expected.” No one, however, appeared; and Linda went up early to her room. There, too, were only candles, a pale wavering illumination in which the past, her father, were extraordinarily nearby. A sense of pride was communicated to her by so much that time had been unable to shake. The bed was steeped in the magic of serene traditions. XX