"A regulah Spanish beauty!" Lloyd thought, as she looked at the picture,
long and admiringly,--the picture of a patrician face with great dark
eyes and a wealth of dusky hair. The old self-conscious, dissatisfied
expression was gone. It was a happy face that smiled back at her. It had
been nearly a year since Lloyd had had a letter from Eugenia. She had
written from the school near Paris that her father was on his way over
from America to join her and take her home immediately after her
graduation. Lloyd had sent a reply addressed to her cousin Carl's
office, but had heard nothing more.
Thinking that the other photograph was her cousin Carl's, Lloyd
unwrapped it, wondering if he had changed as much as Eugenia. To her
surprise, it was not a middle-aged man she saw, with gray moustache and
kindly tired eyes. It was the handsome boyish face of a stranger, yet so
startlingly familiar that she looked at it with a puzzled frown.
"Why should Eugenia be sending me this?" she thought. "And where have I
seen that man befoah?" Then, "Phil Tremont!" she exclaimed aloud the
next instant. "That's who it reminds me of. It is almost exactly like
him, only it is oldah-looking, and the nose isn't quite like his."
She turned the picture over. There on the back was written in Eugenia's
hand the word Venice, and a date underneath the name, Stuart Tremont.
"Phil's brother!" gasped Lloyd, in astonishment. "How strange that she
should know him!"
Tearing open the envelope lying on the bench beside her, Lloyd unfolded
a twenty-page letter from Eugenia, written on thin blue foreign
correspondence paper. Before her glance had travelled half-way down the
second page, she gave another gasp, and sat staring at an underscored
sentence in open-mouthed amazement. Then, never waiting to gather up the
other letters which fluttered into the grass at her feet, as she sprang
up, she rushed off toward the house as hard as she could go, waving
Eugenia's letter in one hand and the photographs in the other.
"Mothah!" she called, as she reached the end of the avenue. She was
tripping over her long skirt, and scattering hairpins at every step, as
her reckless flight sent her hair tumbling down over her shoulders.
"Mothah!" she shrieked again, as she stumbled up the porch steps.
"Here in my room, dear," came the answer from an upper window. Falling
all over herself in her undignified haste, Lloyd tore up the stairs. A
final tangling of skirts sent her headlong into her mother's room, where
she half-fell in a breathless, laughing heap, and sat at Mrs. Sherman's
feet with her hair almost hiding her eager face.
"Guess what's happened!" she demanded, breathlessly. "_Eugenia is
engaged!_ And to Phil Tremont's brother Stuart!"
Then she sat enjoying her mother's surprise, which was almost as great
as her own. "And she isn't much moah than eighteen," Lloyd exclaimed,
rocking back and forth on the floor, with her arms clasped around her
knees, while her mother examined the pictures.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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