The flute shook on Uncle Percival’s knees.  “Ah, Laura, would you have her face the world again?” he asked.

“The world?  Nonsense!  The world doesn’t know there’s such a person in it.  She was forgotten forty years ago, only she has grown so selfish in her grief that she can never believe it.”

The old man sighed and shook his head.  “The women of this generation have had the dew brushed off them,” he lamented, “but your mother understood.  She felt for Angela.”

“And yet it was an old story when my mother came here.”

“Some things never grow old, my dear, and shame is one of them.”

Laura dismissed the assertion with a shrug of scornful protest, and turned the conversation at once into another channel.  “Am I anything like my mother, Uncle Percival?” she asked abruptly.

For a moment the old man pondered the question in silence, his little red hands fingering the mouth of his flute.

“You have the Creole hair and the Creole voice,” he replied; “but for the rest you are your father’s child, every inch of you.”

“My mother was beautiful, I suppose?”

“Your father thought so, but as for me she was too little and passionate.  I can see her now when she would fly into one of her spasms because somebody had crossed her or been impolite without knowing it.”

“They got on badly then—­I mean afterward.”

“What could you expect, my dear?  It was just after the War, and, though she loved your father, she never in her heart of hearts forgave him his blue uniform.  There was no reason in her—­she was all one fluttering impulse, and to live peaceably in this world one must have at least a grain of leaven in the lump of one’s emotion.”  He chuckled as he ended and fixed his mild gaze upon the lamp.  Being very old, he had come to realise that of the two masks possible to the world’s stage, the comic, even if the less spectacular, is also the less commonplace.

“So she died of an overdose of medicine,” said Laura; “I have never been told and yet I have always known that she died by her own hand.  Something in my blood has taught me.”

Uncle Percival shook his head.  “No—­no, she only made a change,” he corrected.  “She was a little white moth who drifted to another sphere—­because she had wanted so much, my child, that this earth would have been bankrupt had it attempted to satisfy her.”

“She wanted what?” demanded Laura, her eyes glowing.

The old man turned upon her a glance in which she saw the wistful curiosity which belongs to age.  “At the moment you remind me of her,” he returned, “and yet you seem so strong where she was only weak.”

“What did she want?  What did she want?” persisted Laura.

“Well, first of all she wanted your father—­every minute of him, every thought, every heart-beat.  He couldn’t give it to her, my dear.  No man could.  I tell you I have lived to a great age, and I have known great people, and I have never seen the man yet who could give a woman all the love she wanted.  Women seem to be born with a kind of divination—­a second sight where love is concerned—­they aren’t content with the mere husk, and yet that is all that the most of them ever get—­”