Page:Resurrection Rock (1920).pdf/77

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THE HOUSEHOLD OF ST. FLORENTIN
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been only sixteen when he ran away and joined the army of the Potomac; his discharge papers; pictures of men, prominent and powerful in their days of the '70s in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois, but now forgotten; here was the framed menu of a dinner to him at the old Tremont House in Chicago; faded and drooping cockades from the Blaine convention and the Harrison campaign; an inscription from Robert Ingersoll and one from Lyman Trumbull.

The furniture of the room also was composed of trophies: the scarred and shabby desk pitted with black holes where great men, in arguing with Lucas, had laid their lighted cigars; the old, hair-cloth lounge; the rows of brittle-backed books—faded brown and yellowish-green and blue—contending projects and issues of two generations ago. Only in the corner where Miss Platt had her desk and typewriter table was a patch of modern office furnishings with vertical filing cases and card index boxes.

A pile of newly typed sheets upon Miss Platt's desk indicated to Ethel that her grandfather had been unusually busy that morning; but the prominent letterhead of a Methodist missionary society suggested that his activities might have been concerned with the religious work which recently had begun to claim much of his time. She turned away to the fire, thinking of her grandfather dictating his letters to the missionaries whom he supported in Africa and India and Malaysia; then came the image of him as she had seen him standing on the hill looking at Barney Loutrelle; and she recalled his hand, so remarkably steady and intent, holding the glass toward the Rock.

"Ethel!" she heard his voice calling her. He had come downstairs and was looking for her in the sitting