"
"I remember it," cried Edith, "I certainly do, or else it was
afterwards told to me so often that it seems a reality."
"The latter is probably the fact," returned Richard. "You were too
young to retain any vivid recollections of that fall."
Still Edith persisted that she did remember the face of a little
girl in the water as she looked over the rock, and of bending to
touch the arm extended toward her. She remembered Bingen, too,
with its purple grapes; else why had she been haunted all her life
with vine-clad hills and plaintive airs.
"Your mother sang to you the airs, while your nurse, whose name I
think was Marie, told you of the grapes growing on the hills,"
said Richard. "She was a faithful creature, greatly attached to
your mother, but a bitter foe of your father. I was too much
absorbed in the shadow stealing over me to pay much heed to my
friends, and after they left Germany I lost sight of them
entirely, nor dreamed that the little girl who came to me that
October morning was my baby Eloise. Your voice always puzzled me,
and something I overheard you saying to Grace one day about your
mysterious hauntings of the past, together with an old song of
Petrea's which you sang, gave me my first suspicion as to who you
were, and decided me upon that trip to New York.
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