Page:Resurrection Rock (1920).pdf/29

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A STRANGER ARRIVES
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her own father was on the side against grandfather—as long as she had known anything. That was as long ago as when she and her father used to live in the old, rough, low-roofed ranch house near the north fork of the Powder River where, they told her, she had been born.

She must have been about five when she realized that the picture of "mamma" which was always in her father's room represented some one who not only had loved papa and Ethel but who also had loved a papa and mamma of her own and a sister, a good deal like her, who was living far away in a meaningless place called France and two brothers who had big houses in a city called Chicago which was as much bigger than Cheyenne as Cheyenne was bigger than Buffalo. Ethel's interrogations as to when she might see that lady who was like mamma, and also mamma's papa and mamma, evoked only indefinite replies at first; but at last her father took her on a train and traveled with her many days till they came to New York where Ethel had the unforgetable experience of living for a week aboard a huge boat while it carried her to a country not at all like Wyoming or New York, but which was called France and where she was told to call everything and every one by strange, interesting names.

She lived in a most wonderful house, called a château, with her aunt Cecilia and uncle Hilaire. Her father did not stay there at all but returned at once to Wyoming. At the end of the year, aunt Cecilia—who had no child of her own—brought her to New York where her father met her. Ethel remembered that first visit to France better than the second one three years later; aunt Cecilia was very pretty and