Isabel rose:  “Excuse me,” she said proudly and turned away.  She reached the door and pausing there put out one of her hands against the lintel as if with weakness and raised the other to her forehead as though with bewilderment and indecision.

Then she came unsteadily back, sank upon her knees, and hid her face in her grandmother’s lap, murmuring through her fingers:  “I have been rude to you, grandmother!  Forgive me!  I do not know what I have been saying.  But any little trouble between us is nothing, nothing!  And do as I beg you—­let this be sacred and secret!  And leave everything to me!”

She crept closer and lifting her face looked up into her grandmother’s.  She shrank back shuddering from what she saw there, burying her face in her hands; then rising she hurried from the room,

Mrs. Conyers sat motionless.

Was it true then that the desire and the work of years for this marriage had come to nothing?  And was it true that this grandchild, for whom she had planned and plotted, did not even respect her and could tell her so to her face?

Those insulting words rang in her ears still:  “You must give me your word of honor . . . it is too late to be sensitive about our characters.”

She sat perfectly still:  and in the parlors there might have been heard at intervals the scratching of her sharp finger nails against the wood of the chair.

IV

The hot day ended.  Toward sunset a thunder-shower drenched the earth, and the night had begun cool and refreshing.

Mrs. Conyers was sitting on the front veranda, waiting for her regular Sunday evening visitor.  She was no longer the self-revealed woman of the afternoon, but seemingly an affable, harmless old lady of the night on the boundary of her social world.  She was dressed with unfailing:  elegance—­and her taste lavished itself especially on black silk and the richest lace.  The shade of heliotrope satin harmonized with the yellowish folds of her hair.  Her small, warm, unwrinkled hands were without rings, being too delicately beautiful.  In one she held a tiny fan, white and soft like the wing of a moth; on her lap lay a handkerchief as light as smoke or a web of gossamer.

She rocked softly.  She unfolded and folded the night-moth fan softly.  She touched the handkerchief to her rosy youthful lips softly.  The south wind blew in her face softly.  Everything about her was softness, all her movements were delicate and refined.  Even the early soft beauty of her figure was not yet lost. (When a girl of nineteen, she had measured herself by the proportions of the ideal Venus; and the ordeal had left her with a girdle of golden reflections.)