They are thenceforth homeless and desolate.
No sense of having benefited living persons would have afforded Miss
Ludington the pleasure she took in feeling that, by rebuilding ancient
Hilton, she had restored homes to these homeless ones.
But of all this fabric of the past which she had resurrected, the central
figure was the school-girl Ida Ludington. The restored village was the
mausoleum of her youth.
Over the great old-fashioned fireplace, in the sitting-room of the
homestead which she had rebuilt in the midst of the village, she had hung
a portrait in oil, by the first portrait-painter then in the country. It
was an enlarged copy of the little likeness on ivory which had formerly
been so great a solace to her.
The portrait was executed with extremely life-like effect, and was fondly
believed by Miss Ludington to be a more accurate likeness in some
particulars than the ivory picture itself.
It represented a very beautiful girl of seventeen or eighteen, although
already possessing the ripened charms of a woman. She was dressed in
white, with a low bodice, her luxuriant golden hair, of a rare sheen and
fineness, falling upon beautifully moulded shoulders.
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