It was the summer Matilda was twelve. Mathilde Lantier Gessler had come to Crittenden from Baltimore to see her son once more before she died. Grandmother Gessler was tall and every inch of her was swarthy. Her eyes were as black as bottomless water and as imperishable as diamonds. There was a tuft of hair on her jutting chin, and it was proudly apparent that her lips had curved once. She came and stayed three days. Before she left she took Matilda aside. “_Ma petite_,” she whispered harshly, “I am content that it is the _père_ you resemble and not that fat _other_.” “Why?” asked Matilda, perversely delighted at this allusion to her mother’s size. “Because, _ma cherie_, it is the dark and slender ones of the earth that know how to suffer, and yet keep their joy.” “Oh, Grandma,” exclaimed the child, “you are happy then!” “Of course,” the old woman assured her gallantly, “and a great number of tears I might have shed and did not. I laughed sixteen hours out of the twenty-four and smiled in my sleep the other eight. The dreams I had under the crimson canopy of that ancient bed across the sea! But that was before it was decided that I marry Franz Gessler, the merchant, and make an end in Baltimore.” “Merchant?” queried Matilda. “Is that why Papa keeps a store?” Mathilde shrugged her aristocratic old shoulders. “God punished us. I was young and dark and it made trouble. Franz Gessler was fat and yellow and he dropped dead of it.” “Is that why we are so poor and the store smells so awful?” And then it had seemed to Matilda that her grandmother peered down at her for the first time. “Ah, yes,” she sighed, stroking the braided silk of her granddaughter’s hair. “Ah, yes!” “Tell me more,” begged Matilda. “Tell me everything.” But the old woman had suddenly grown stubborn or weary. She sat there and kept quiet about the walled gardens in which she had strolled; the suitors she had tormented over sundials; the mistake she made that night the moon shone with such Hellenic tenderness; the tearful morning they packed her into the eager arms of the old German merchant and hurried them both off to Baltimore. But she did rouse from her romantic napping long enough to say: “_Ma petite fille_, there was a thing or two I had from a woman who knew how to love beyond bounds and suffer with triumph. One summer afternoon I saw her at Nohant. There were books on the floor, an unfinished letter to Flaubert on the writing table, and Dumas sitting in a corner. She deserted everything to talk to me. Her eyes were wisdom, her hands were comforting, and her smile contagious. I left, but before that she gave me these,” and the old woman drew up a yellowed package from the capacious pocket of her gown. “They are for you.” And she smiled a wise and curious smile. The package contained a picture and a book, and very old they both looked. “The original,” explained the grandmother, holding up the picture, “was painted by Delacroix.”