Page:Emma Speed Sampson--The shorn lamb.djvu/53

Rh time and windows opening on those porches had been cut down and made into glass doors.

Each high-born lady who had married into the Taylor family had brought with her treasures from her home—a set of Chippendale chairs, a Sheraton sideboard, a claw-foot table or the portrait of some ancestor in high stock and powdered cue. So it was that, in spite of the fact that the present head of the Taylor family, and owner of Mill House, persisted in asserting himself to be no aristocrat, he was the possessor of perhaps as fine a collection of antique furniture as could be found in Virginia.

Major Robert Taylor was showing more than his sixty-five years of age. His hair, which had been blond, was snow white. His face was lined and seamed with wrinkles; his shoulders were stooped; his back bent. He looked like a man of seventy-five or more. However, his eyes were as blue as ever they had been; his hearing was even keener; his tongue, if possible, sharper. On that morning in June he sat in his library waiting for the mail before going to the hub factory. He was a lonely soul, a bookish man who had nobody with whom he could talk books. His son, Spottswood, and his daughters, Evelyn and Myra, read when there was nothing else to do and their type of reading matter was