“It is the ancestry of Katrine Dulany,” Dr. Johnston returned, looking at Frank with an untranslatable smile.

A silence fell between them, broken at length by the doctor.  “I have decided to take Mr. Dulany to New York with me.  I shall keep him near me as long as is necessary.  If there is no organic trouble, of which I have some fear, the case will be simple enough, if there is the desire in him to help me.  He was keen to have his daughter go with him, but I told him frankly it was better that she should not go.  He leans too much on her.  He must strengthen his own will; he must learn to rely on himself.”

As the doctor spoke it was not of Patrick Dulany that Francis thought, but of Katrine.  The people were coming on the twenty-seventh; it was now but the seventeenth.  He would have her to himself for ten days, ten days of those caressing eyes, of the charming voice and open adulation, and then?  He closed his eyes to whatever lay beyond.  He would go away to keep his engagements and forget.  He always had forgotten; he would, he thought, be able always to forget.

And the ten days were his; days on the river fishing by the Indian Rocks, or drifting with the current under the dogwoods’ white, open faces down to the falls; days with lunches in the rose-garden, and Abt and Schubert songs under the pines at twilight, when their hands touched in the exchange of a flower or a book and lingered in the touching; when their eyes had learned the answering of each other with no spoken word.  And the question and answer were the same in the Garden of Eden, before man and woman made their first great mistake and did the thing that was intended for them to do.

For Frank this companionship was unutterably sweet.  He enjoyed the small and unimportant events of their intercourse; the way Katrine would save flowers for him to wear, pinning them in his coat with a flushed cheek, or read, with an ecstasy of appreciation, a line from some great writer, marking a meaning he had never found, or laugh at his old riding-clothes, his Southern prejudices, saying once:  “To a man of the world like myself, these ideas seem trivial.”

On one of these ten precious days the lawyers at Marlton telephoned him to obtain an interview.  The business was important, and he started immediately for a conference with them.  By the fence opening into the main road from the lodge he found Katrine, in her high-waisted black frock, looking out between the bars of the great swinging gate, with a radiance about her, an inconsequential joy such as he had never seen before in any human being.  She had a letter tucked in her breast, and at sight of him she touched it.

“He is getting better, better, better, and the doctor writes he may be quite himself again,” she said, with no salutation whatever, her face a wonder to behold.

“I am rejoiced more than I can say, Katrine,” he answered.

“You have been so good,” she replied, gratefully.