The furniture was rare and old and comfortable, and would have graced many a finer mansion. One or two chairs done in fine handmade tapestry softly faded with the years, tables and cabinets that had come down from the masters in woodwork. A rosewood piano of a make some thirty years back, whose name was still dignified and honored. Athalie stood and gazed around, half contemptuously. The chairs, yes—but the carpet! How funny! She would have to see that it was taken up at once and a hardwood floor—of course—this would be a grand room for a dance. She gave an experimental whirl on a cautious toe. Those curtains were gloomy! She slid a sleek hand into a well-camouflaged silken pocket and brought out chocolates to fortify herself. Her mouth comfortingly filled with the creamy velvet of Dutch creams, she started on a tour of inspection, pausing first before an ancestral portrait hanging above a curiously carved sofa with handwrought tapestry upholstery. The picture frame, tarnished with the years, seemed like an open doorway to the past. From it looked out a woman plain of face, smooth of hair, with a carved high black comb towering above her sleek head and bearing a bird on her finger. The eyes were so expressionless and the face so somber that it was impossible not to connect it with a monotonous existence. A woman satisfied with a pet bird! Athalie paused and took in the thought. A lift of her well-rounded shoulders, a contemptuous smile, that was her reaction to the woman of long ago. She meant little to the girl modern in all her thoughts and feelings. There was hardly a shadow of conception of that sheltered, sweet, strong life that had given much to the world in her passing. The girl passed to the portrait of the man in military uniform hanging between the two long front windows, and her jaws paused in their slow rhythmic manipulation of the chocolates to study him a moment. This must be old General Silver. Her mother had told her about him. Not much, only that he had been something—made some great mark in the Civil War, or was it the war before that? Athalie’s ideas of history were most vague. She knew only that it was very long ago if one might judge by the old-fashioned haircut, the high collar, the strange insignia, not in the least like a modern soldier. He had bushy eyebrows, from beneath which his piercing eyes looked over her head straight out to some far-seen enemy, keen, cutting, stern—the girl shuddered. There had been that look in the eye of this newfound father of hers, not at all fatherly, not “dadish” as she expressed it to herself, purely official. He was like his ancestor, she decided, as she stood and watched the picture. Disappointing. Quite as Lilla had said he would be. Hard as stone. Flint in his eye. No yielding to coaxing. No weakness anywhere that one could probe. Was the bird lady his wife or daughter? She looked back and studied the first portrait critically, deciding she must have been his wife.