expressionless ancestresses in stiff brocade
or short-waisted, clinging draperies, but all possessing that brilliant
coloring which the gray skies outside lacked, and which seemed to have
departed from the dresses of their descendants. The American girl had
sometimes speculated upon what might have been the appearance of the
lime-tree walk, dotted with these gayly plumaged folk, and wondered if
the tyranny of environment had at last subdued their brilliant colors.
And a new feeling touched her. Like most of her countrywomen, she was
strongly affected by the furniture of life; the thought that all that
she saw there MIGHT BE HERS; that she might yet stand in succession to
these strange courtiers and stranger shepherdesses, and, like them, look
down from the canvas upon the intruding foreigner, thrilled her for a
moment with a half-proud, half-passive sense of yielding to what seemed
to be her fate. A narrow-eyed, stiff-haired Dutch maid of honor before
whom she was standing gazed at her with staring vacancy. Suddenly
she started. Before the portrait upon a fanciful easel stood a small
elaborately framed sketch in oils. It was evidently some recently
imported treasure. She had not seen it before. As she moved quickly
forward, she recognized at a glance that it was Ostrander's sketch from
the Paris grenier.

The wall, the room, the park beyond, even the gray sky, seemed to fade
away before her. She was standing once more at her attic window looking
across the roofs and chimney stacks upward to the blue sky of Paris.
Through a gap in the roofs she could see the chestnut-trees trilling in
the little square; she could hear the swallows twittering in the leaden
troughs of the gutter before her; the call of the chocolate vender
or the cry of a gamin floated up to her from the street below, or
the latest song of the cafe chantant was whistled by the blue-bloused
workman on the scaffolding hard by. The breath of Paris, of youth, of
blended work and play, of ambition, of joyous freedom, again filled her
and mingled with the scent of the mignonette that used to stand on the
old window-ledge.

"I am glad you like it. I have only just put it up."

It was the voice of Sir James--a voice that had regained a little of
its naturalness--a calm, even lazy English voice--confident from the
experience of years of respectful listeners. Yet it somehow jarred upon
her nerves with its complacency and its utter incongruousness to her
feelings.