“Clem has told me of you, Mr. Blake.  I feel that you are one of us.  Let me thank you at once for the consideration you have shown him.”

In the half light I hesitated awkwardly enough to speak her name, for I felt that this could not be the mother of Little Miss.  Rather was it the daughter herself.  I stammered words that must have revealed my uncertainty, for again she laughed, and then she ordered lights.

Clem came soft-footedly with a branching candelabra, which he placed on the round-topped old table by which she had been sitting.  She moved a step to where the soft lights glowed up into her face, and with mock seriousness stood to be surveyed fairly.

“There, Mr. Blake!  You see I confess all my years.”

And I saw the truth, that she loitered gracefully among the vague and pleasant fifties.  But then she did a thing which would have been injudicious in most women of her years.  Her hand, still holding my roses, went up to her face, and her cheek glowed dusky and pink against the yellow petals.  I saw that she rightly appraised her own daring and felt free to say:—­

“You see!  My confusion was inevitable.  Not one of those candles can be spared if I am to believe you are Miss Caroline.”

Again she laughed, revealing now a girlish freshness in the small mouth, that had somehow lingered to belie the deeper, graver lines about her dark eyes.  As she still regarded me with that smiling, waiting lift of the short upper lip, I called out:—­

“More lights, Clem!  I need all you have.”

Whereat Miss Caroline fell into her chair with a marvellous blush, an undeniable darkening of the pink on cheeks that were in texture like the finest, sheerest lawn.

Never thereafter could I refuse credence to tales, of which many came to me, exposing Miss Caroline as an able and relentless coquette.  Nor could I fail to understand how the late Colonel Jere Lansdale would have found need to be a duellist after he became her lover, even had he aforetime been unskilled in that difficult art.

As she chatted, chiefly of her journey, I falsely pretended to listen, whereas I only stared and in spirit was prostrate before her.  Mere kneeling at her feet savored too nearly of arrogance.  I felt the need to be a spread rug in her presence.  She sat back in the chair that embraced her loosely, a slight figure with a small head, on which the heavy strands of whitening hair seemed only a powdered lie above the curiously girlish face.  A tiny black patch or two on the face, I thought, would have made this illusion perfect.  And yet when she did not laugh, or in some little silence of recollection, the deeper lines stood out, and I could see that sorrow had long known its way to her face.  It even lurked now back of her eyes, and I knew that she tried to keep her face lighted for me so that I should not detect it.  She succeeded admirably, but the smile could not always be there, and ghosts of her dead years came stealthily to haunt her face as surely as the smile went.