“Oh yes, I remember,” said Sylvia, quoting fluently from an often heard tale.  “I’ve heard them tell about it lots of times.  She was earning money to pay for her last year in college, and dropped a history book out of her basket as she started to get back in the wagon, and Father picked it up and said, ’Why, good Lord! who in Lydford reads Gibbon?’ And Mother said it was hers, and they talked a while, and then he got in and rode off with her.”

“Yes,” said Aunt Victoria, “that was how it happened....  Pauline, get out the massage cream and do my face, will you?”

She did not talk any more for a time, but when she began, it was again of Lydford that she spoke, running along in a murmured stream of reminiscences breathed faintly between motionless lips that Pauline’s reverent ministrations might not be disturbed.  Through the veil of these half-understood recollections, Sylvia saw highly inaccurate pictures of great magnificent rooms filled with heavy old mahogany furniture, of riotously colored rose-gardens, terraced and box-edged, inhabited by beautiful ladies always, like Aunt Victoria, “dressed-up,” who took tea under brightly striped, pagoda-shaped tents, waited upon by slant-eyed Japanese (it seemed Aunt Victoria had nothing but Japanese servants).  The whole picture shimmered in the confused imagination of the listening little girl, till it blended indistinguishably with the enchantment of her fairy-stories.  It all seemed a background natural enough for Aunt Victoria, but Sylvia could not fit her father into it.

“Ah, he’s changed greatly—­he’s transformed—­he is not the same creature,” Aunt Victoria told her gravely, speaking according to her seductive habit with Sylvia, as though to an equal.  “The year when we lost our money and he married, altered all the world for us.”  She linked the two events together, and was rewarded by seeing the reference slide over Sylvia’s head.

“Did you lose your money, too?” asked Sylvia, astounded.  It had never occurred to her that Aunt Victoria might have been affected by that event in her father’s life, with which she was quite familiar through his careless references to what he seemed to regard as an interesting but negligible incident.

“All but the slightest portion of it, my dear—­when I was twenty years old.  Your father was twenty-five.”

Sylvia looked about her at the cut-glass and silver utensils on the lace-covered dressing-table, at Aunt Victoria’s pale lilac crepe-de-chine negligee, at the neat, pretty young maid deft-handedly rubbing the perfumed cream into the other woman’s well-preserved face, impassive as an idol’s.  “Why—­why, I thought—­” she began and stopped, a native delicacy making her hesitate as Judith never did.

Aunt Victoria understood.  “Mr. Smith had money,” she explained briefly.  “I married when I was twenty-one.”

“Oh,” said Sylvia.  It seemed an easy way out of difficulties.  She had never before chanced to hear Aunt Victoria mention her long-dead husband.