Explore "The Little Old Portrait" by Mary Louisa Molesworth on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"On a fine summer evening about two years after the sad day that had seen the departure of Edmee and her mother from their beloved home, Madame Germain, with her husband and son, was sitting on the bench in front of their cottage -- the cottage which is at present, at the time I am writing, inhabited by Mathurine Le Blanc and her sons, standing, as I think I have already said, some short way out of the village -- enjoying a little rest after the labour of the day. Not that they were altogether idle. The mother was of course knitting, the father smoking his pipe, if that can be considered an occupation, and the son was holding an open letter in his hand, from which he had just been reading aloud.
"`Yes,' he said, `in a few days from now we may certainly expect her. She was to leave the next week, my lady says, and that is a fortnight ago.'