Honduras, his coloured man, as indispensable outside as Rudolph was in, followed with her bag up the narrow flight of steps to the floor above.  He waited through, he thought, a reasonable interval, and then called.  An indistinguishable reply floated down, mingled with the filling of a tub; and another half hour passed before Mariana appeared in white chiffon, securing a broad girdle of silver oak leaves, about her slight waist.  “Do you mind?” she turned before him; and, with an impatience half assumed and half actual, he fastened the last hooks of her dress.  “As you know,” he reminded her, “I don’t attempt cocktails.  Will you have a gin and bitters?”

She wouldn’t, frankly; and they embarked on dinner in a pleasant, unstrained silence.  Mariana was, he realized, the only person alive for whom he had a genuine warmth of affection.  She was a first cousin; her Aunt Elizabeth had married James Penny, his father; but his fondness for her had no root in that fact.  It didn’t, for example, extend to her brother Kingsfrere.  He speculated again on the reason for her marked effect.  Mariana was not lovely, as had been the charmers of his own day; her features, with the exception of her eyes, were unremarkable.  And her eyes, variably blue, were only arresting because of their extraordinary intensity of vision, their unquenchable and impertinent curiosity.  A girl absolutely different from all his cherished mental images; but, for Howat Penny, always potent, always arousing a response from his supercritical being, stirring his aesthetic heart.  Everything he possessed—­his pictures, the albums, the moderate income, although she had little need of that—­had been willed to her.  It would be hers then just as it was, practically, now.  And he was aware that her feeling generously equalled his own.

His speculation, penetrating deeper than customary, rewarded him with the thought that she was unusual in the courage of her emotions.  That was it—­the courage of her emotions!  There was a total lack of any penurious trait, any ulterior thought of appraising herself against a possible advantageous barter.  She was never concerned with a conscious prudery in the arrangement of her skirt.  Mariana was aristocratic in the correct sense of the term; a sense, he realized, now almost lost.  And he rated aristocracy of bearing higher than any other condition or fact.

He wondered a little at her patent pleasure in visiting him, an old man, so frequently.  Hardly a month passed but that, announced by telegram, she did not appear and stay over night, or for a part of the week.  She would recount minutely the current gaiety of her polite existence.  He knew the names of her associates, a number of them had been exhibited to him at Shadrach; the location of their country places; and what men temporarily monopolized her interest.  None of the latter had been serious.  He was, selfishly, glad of that; and waited uneasily through her every visit until she assured him that her affections had not been possessed.  However, this condition, he knew, must soon come to an end; Mariana was instinct with sex; and a short while before he had sent his acknowledgment of her twenty-sixth birthday.