d dusty files of the New York _Tribune_; about the
pantry with its cookie-jar, and the "back room" with its churn and
cheese-press.

Nothing of all this existed in the Lydford of which Aunt Victoria
spoke, although some of her recollections were also of childhood
hours. Once Sylvia asked her, "But if you were a little girl there,
and Mother was too,--then you and Father and she must have played
together sometimes?"

Aunt Victoria had replied with decision, "No, I never saw your mother,
and neither did your father--until a few months before they were
married."

"Well, wasn't that _queer_?" exclaimed Sylvia--"she _always_ lived in
Lydford except when she went away to college."

Aunt Victoria seemed to hesitate for words, something unusual with
her, and finally brought out, "Your mother lived on a farm, and we
lived in our summer house in the village." She added after a moment's
deliberation: "Her uncle, who kept the farm, furnished us with our
butter. Sometimes your mother used to deliver it at the kitchen door."
She looked hard at Sylvia as she spoke.

"Well, I should have thought you'd have seen her _there_!" said Sylvia
in surprise. Nothing came to the Marshalls' kitchen door which was not
in the children's field of consciousness.

"It was, in fact, there that your father met her," stated Aunt
Victoria briefly.

"Oh yes, I remember," said Sylvia, quoting fluently from an often
heard tale. "I've heard them tell about it lots of times. She was
earning money to pay for her last year in college, and dropped a
history book out of her basket as she started to get back in the
wagon, and Father picked it up and said, 'Why, good Lord! who in
Lydford reads Gibbon?' And Mother said it was hers, and they talked a
while, and then he got in and rode off with her."

"Yes," said Aunt Victoria, "that was how it happened.... Pauline, get
out the massage cream and do my face, will you?"

She did not talk any more for a time, but when she began, it was again
of Lydford that she spoke, running along in a murmured stream of
reminiscences breathed faintly between motionless lips that Pauline's
reverent ministrations might not be disturbed. Through the veil of
these half-understood recollections, Sylvia saw highly inaccurate
pictures of great magnificent rooms filled with heavy old mahogany
furniture, of riotously colored rose-gardens, terraced and
box-edged, inhabited by beautiful ladies always, like Aunt Victoria,
"dressed-up,"