Vi spoke slowly.  Even for an English woman she had a low voice.  It was a voice of peculiar power.  One always waited for it to finish.  Vi knew its power.  She tormented her opponents by drawling.  Blanche also spoke softly, but at will she could make her words scratch like the sharp claws of a kitten.

“And how did you ever get the model to take that startled pose?” Blanche was asking Lewis.

“That’s where the luck came in,” said Lewis, smiling; “and the luck is what keeps the work from being great.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” said Lewis, “Le Brux says that luck often leads to success, never to greatness.”

“And how did luck come in?” drawled Vi.

Lewis smiled again.

“I’ll tell you,” he said.  “The model is an old pal of mine.  One day we were bathing in the Marne,—­at least I was bathing, and she was just going to,—­when a farmer appeared on the scene and yelled at her.  She was startled and turning to make a run for it when I shouted, ’Hold that pose, Cellette!  She’s a mighty well-trained model.  For a second she held the pose.  That was enough.  She remembered it ever after.

“Does it take a lot of training to be a model?” asked Blanche.  “How would I do?” She turned her bare shoulders frankly to him.

Lewis glanced at her.  “Yours is not a beauty that can be held in stone,” he said.  “You are too respectable for a bacchante, too vivacious for anything else.”  He turned to Vi.  “You would do better,” he said as though she too had asked.

Vi said nothing, but her large, dark eyes suddenly looked away and beyond the room.  A flush rose slowly into her smooth, dusky cheek.  Blanche bit her under lip.

“Vi has won out,” said H lne to Leighton.

CHAPTER XXVI

Natalie and her mother were sitting on the west veranda of Consolation Cottage at the evening hour.  Just within the open door of the dining-room mammy swayed to and fro in a vast rocking-chair that looked too big for her.

The years had not dealt kindly with the three.  Years in the tropics never do deal kindly with women.  Mammy had grown old and thin.  Her clothes, frayed, but clean, hung loosely upon her.  Her hair was turning gray.  She wore steel-rimmed glasses.  Mrs. Leighton’s face, while it had not returned to the apathy of the years of sorrow at Nadir, was still deeply lined and of the color and texture of old parchment.  The blue of her eyes had paled and paled until light seemed to have almost gone from them.  To Natalie had come age with youth.  She gave the impression of a freshly cut flower suddenly wilted by the sun.

In Mrs. Leighton’s lap lay two letters.  One had brought the news that Natalie had inherited from a Northern Leighton aunt an old property on a New England hillside.  The other contained the third offer from a development company that had long coveted the grounds about Consolation Cottage.