“Oh, yes,” said I as simply as I could. So we sat side by side for the first time in all our lives, and after a time—after quite a time—I felt his hand touching mine under the folds of my flame-colored dress. It has a scarf to it, that floats from the shoulders. It is quite vol—how do you spell it?—voluminous. That is why we could hold hands.
But I was afraid uncle and auntie were watching us. So I had an idea.
“Oh, dearest dear grandmother,” I said, “this is the night of all the world for a story. Grandmother, you _must_ tell us a story—if you _please_.”
“I will do it,” she said. “I will tell you the story of an ancestress of yours.”
I have partly written that story, Carin, and when I have finished it I shall send it to you.
Play you are sitting in the firelight with all my family, and Keefe close beside me, and the rain falling outside. If the wind whistles down the chimney, it is, after all, not loud enough to drown my little grandmother’s voice, for it is a high and musical one, and rises above noises louder than itself. Very snug and happy we all are. It is a witching hour, and grandmother looks unearthly and shining, with her hair gleaming in the firelight like a silver cloud in the sun.
“Once on a time,” said she, beginning her story in the good old way, “there was an ancestress of yours, Azalea, my dear, named Dorothy Marshall. She was so gentle and sweet a woman that long, long after she was dead, the fame of her lived on, though no woman ever led a quieter life than she did. They say she had fair hair and dark blue eyes, with a complexion not pale, but golden, and ripe, full lips, and a beautiful dimple in her chin. In her youth she was a gallant horsewoman and she could sail a boat like a man. Indeed, it was the sea that she loved the best, though she grew up amid beautiful fields and was often in the mountains. But to be within sound and sight of the sea, and to have the smell of it in her nostrils, made her a happy woman indeed.
“That may have been one of the reasons that when she was only eighteen she married Samuel Bings. Now the Bings were a seafaring family if ever there was one. Twelve sons were there, giants all, and save one, each before he died became the commander of his own ship on the sea. They were merchantmen, these ships, in the carrying trade between Norfolk and ports all over the world, and to this day there are many strange things in our family which they brought from half around the world.