Page:Neith Boyce--The bond.djvu/50

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THE BOND
48

country they had lived in, and usually left behind, in large boxes marked "library," when the family took its unpremeditated flight. When Teresa's mother, a widow, had decided to come home, she had tried to reassemble her scattered household goods. The "library" seemed to stand the stress of time and removals better than the furniture, much of which fell to pieces in transit; Teresa had about three thousand volumes covering her walls, with space left only for a portrait of her father, painted by a German friend of the family in acknowledgment of an unrepayable loan. It was not a bad portrait; it vividly presented Konald Grange as Teresa remembered him—his thin, bearded face, his soft, fiery eyes, his whole look of meditative fragility. He was a South Carolinian, and his wife an energetic but unpractical New Englander; and they had quarrelled so much retrospectively over the war of secession and the ethics of slavery that at times in their European wanderings the family had split; Teresa going with the father, whom she adored, and the elder daughter, Nina, with the mother. Some years after her father's death Nina had married an Italian of good but impoverished family. She had been married for her beauty and for love, having no money. But soon it appeared that love was hardly enough, and that money was pressingly necessary.