She looked at the old man in an astonishment which she knew must seem fairly stupid to him, but she could not bring out anything else.  What was it to her, whether a Negro physician was called Dr. or “Jo”?

Mr. Welles patted her hand, released it, smiled at her kindly, and stood up.  “I’m pretty tired.  I guess we’d better be getting along home, Vincent and I.”

“Well, I should say we would better be getting along home to bed!” agreed the other man, coming forward and slipping his arm under the older man’s.  “I’ll tuck you up, my old friend, with a good hot toddy inside you, and let you sleep off this outrageously crazy daylight nightmare you’ve cooked up for yourself.  And don’t wake up with the fate of the Japanese factory-hand sitting on your chest, or you’ll get hard to live with.”

Mr. Welles answered this with literal good faith.  “Oh, the Japanese factory-hands, they’re not on the conscience of Americans.”

“But, when I see an aged and harmless inhabitant of Ashley, Vermont, stretching his poor old protesting conscience till it cracks, to make it reach clear down to the Georgia Negroes, how do I know where he’s going to stop?”

The old man turned to their hostess.  “Well, good-night, Mrs. Crittenden.  I enjoyed seeing that wonderful flower very much.  I wonder if I could grow one like it?  It would be something to look forward to, to have the flower open in your own house.”

To Marise he looked so sweet and good, and like a tired old child, that she longed to kiss him good-night, as she had her own.  But even as she felt the impulse, she had again a startled sense of how much more goes on under the human surface than ever appears.  Evidently Mr. Welles, too, was a locked and sealed strong-box of secrets.

* * * * *

In the doorway Marsh stopped abruptly and said, looking at the dense, lustreless black silk wrap about Marise’s head and shoulders, “What’s that thing?  I meant to ask you when you put it on.”

She felt as she often did when he spoke to her, as startled as though he had touched her.  What an extraordinarily living presence he was, so that a word from him was almost like an actual personal contact.  But she took care not to show this.  She looked down casually at the soft, opaque folds of her wrap.  “Oh, this is a thousand years old.  It dates from the Bayonne days.  It’s Basque.  It’s their variation, I imagine, on the Spanish mantilla.  They never wear hats, the Basque women.  The little girls, when they have made their first communion, wear a scarf of light net, or open transparent lace.  And when they marry they wear this.  It’s made of a special sort of silk, woven just for this purpose.  As far away as you can see a woman in the Basque country, if she wears this, you know she’s married.”

“Oh, you do, do you?” said Marsh, going out after his companion.

* * * * *