"Eh, well, now, and your poor mother, she would be well! Hut, tut, Wallace! Bruce! Yon's no way to act. And wee Mary'll be getting married--Princie! Did ye ever see the like o' that? They're jist that glad to see ye. Wallace! Down, sir, down! Jist wait till Gavie gits home, Bruce, then ye'll mind! And Sandy's away to the college too. Well, well, you Lindsays were all great for the books--come away in, hinny, come away. Down with ye, down!" They went into the house, the dogs still bounding joyously about, for they knew that a guest at Craig-Ellachie was a great and glad event and that they must express their joy in a fitting manner. Auntie Elspie was tall and thin and stooped. Her thin fair hair, almost white, was combed up in the fashion that had obtained when she was a girl. She wore a voluminous old dress of some ancient pattern of "print," that had been quite fashionable some twenty years earlier, but she was also clothed in the gay garment of youth which the Grant Girls always wore. She managed to eject the joyous, scrambling quartette from the kitchen and led the visitor through the dusk of the parlour where Auntie Flora's organ stood with Gavin's fiddle on top of it, on into the gloom of the spare room, heaping welcomes upon her all the way, and asking after everything on the Lindsay farm from Grandpa's rheumatism to Christina's black kitten. When Christina's hat was laid upon the high white crest of the billowing feather bed, and her hair smoothed before the little mirror on the dresser, Auntie Elspie led her away beyond the parlour into a close, hushed room, where the mother had lain an invalid for many years, and which was kept sacred to her memory. Here the Grant Girls hoarded all their mother's treasures: the photographs in oval frames on the wall, the high old dresser and the big sea chest filled with keepsakes, tenderly associated with her life; the Paisley shawl she wore to church, the sea shells she had brought from the old country, even the old china tea set that had been her one wedding gift. Christina was placed in an old rocker, while Auntie Elspie displayed all the treasures as a girl shows her jewels to a companion, and Christina knew she was being shown a great honour, for only special friends were ever taken into Mother's Room. The last jewel to be exhibited was the mother's photograph in an old leather case, velvet lined. "Folks say that after a person dies, the picture begins to fade," Auntie Elspie said, wiping the shining surface tenderly. "But mother's picture is as bright as the day it was taken." Christina looked at the strong, kindly face, with the white cap and the little knitted shawl and felt her heart contract at the yearning in the older woman's voice. Elspie was still a girl, longing for the touch of her mother's hand, though that mother had been gone twenty-five years.