Mrs. Lapham was even better
satisfied with their bargain than the Colonel himself,
and they had lived in Nankeen Square for twelve years.
They had seen the saplings planted in the pretty oval
round which the houses were built flourish up into sturdy
young trees, and their two little girls in the same period
had grown into young ladies; the Colonel's tough frame had
expanded into the bulk which Bartley's interview indicated;
and Mrs. Lapham, while keeping a more youthful outline,
showed the sharp print of the crow's-foot at the corners
of her motherly eyes, and certain slight creases in
her wholesome cheeks. The fact that they lived in an
unfashionable neighbourhood was something that they had
never been made to feel to their personal disadvantage,
and they had hardly known it till the summer before
this story opens, when Mrs. Lapham and her daughter
Irene had met some other Bostonians far from Boston,
who made it memorable. They were people whom chance had
brought for the time under a singular obligation to the
Lapham ladies, and they were gratefully recognisant of it.
They had ventured--a mother and two daughters--as far
as a rather wild little Canadian watering-place on the
St. Lawrence, below Quebec, and had arrived some days
before their son and brother was expected to join them.
Two of their trunks had gone astray, and on the night
of their arrival the mother was taken violently ill.
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