"Allison Clyde?" he repeated. He remembered the name vaguely as one of some old friend of the family. "An old lady." He had not reckoned his indifferent label a question, but his aunt took it up. "We never think of her as that. She is younger," Lucretia Hall conceded, "than I am. Allison is universally admired. Mrs. Herrick"--she quoted the oracle of her circle in that last-generation manner that proclaims the accepted--"says that Allison is a personage." Miss Lucretia turned toward the house; her nephew followed her. "Any relation to the historian, bane of my youth?" he asked. "His daughter," Lucretia gladly expounded; "and her brother, the poet, died young. Allison herself--very gifted musically." The fragments came back to him as his aunt preceded him with her small, hesitating steps up the narrow path. The picture of an old lady playing the "Songs without Words" passed through Mark's mind, and he began to plan flight. "But she was obliged to give up her music to care for her invalid father." "I heard Stella playing," Mark commented. His aunt rejoined after a moment: "She doesn't seem at all nervous. Young people aren't in these days. At her age, if any one asked me to play, I was terrified." Her nephew smiled down at her, hooking her with an affectionate arm. "What used you to play, _Tante_? The 'Blue Alsatian Mountains' and the 'Stéphanie Gavotte'?" Her faded smile held a faint surprise. "How did you know?" "I am a clairvoyant, and did you sing, 'Then You'll Remember Me?'" "No, I never sang; but Mary--your mother--did." They reached the back porch and passed through the wide hall into the shaded spaciousness of the drawing-room. In that quiet interior light that rested softly upon the decorous portraits of his forebears, the mahogany, and the accumulated bric-à-brac of three generations, he became aware of the incongruous presence of Stella. He realized again her clean-cut, finished daintiness, the incisiveness of voice and feature. As he released her hand, still aware of its hard, boyish grip, he heard his aunt's voice, light, wandering, non-arresting, as if continuing some conversational thread, "And Miss Allison Clyde, Mark--my old friend." He had been vaguely aware of some one else in the room, but when he met the smile of the older woman who held out her hand to him, he wondered that he had not realized it more promptly; for Miss Allison Clyde, although far removed from the youth of years, had about her something immediately and quietly charming--something, it occurred to him, that suggested autumnal perfumes and the warmth of late sunlight. It was a face with a certain fine austerity belonging to a generation at once more natural and more reserved than ours. "So this is Mary's boy," she said. "You have her eyes." He looked at her and unconsciously glanced at Stella. The older woman belonged to the quiet old room. Stella, despite the same inheritance, did not.