Mrs. Penny was talking with charming earnestness to the man on her other hand.  The amber radiance flickered over the beautiful curves of her shoulders and cast a warm shadow at the base of her throat.  She smiled at her son; and her face, in spite of its present gaiety, held a definite reminder of her years, almost fifty; but when she turned again her profile, with slightly tilted nose and delightfully fresh lips and chin, was that of a girl no older than Caroline.  Howat had often noticed this.  It was amazing—­with that slight movement she would seem to lose at once all the years that had accumulated since she was newly married.  In a second she would appear to leave them all, her mature children, the heavy, palpably aging presence of Gilbert Penny, the house and obligations that had grown about her, and be remotely young, a stranger to the irrefutable proof that her youth had gone.  At such moments he was almost reluctant to claim her attention, to bring her again, as it were, into the present, with so much spent, lapsed:  at times he almost thought, in that connection, wasted.

She had, in addition to her profile, a spirit of youth that had remained undimmed; as if there were within her a reserve warmth, a priceless gift, which life had never claimed; and it was the contemplation of that which gave Howat the impression that Isabel Penny’s life had not fully flowered.  He had never known her to express a regret of the way she had taken; he had never even surprised her in a perceptible retrospective dejection; but the conviction remained.  Gilbert Penny had been an almost faultless husband, tender and firm and successful; but his wife had come from other blood and necessities than domestic felicities; she had been a part of a super-cultivation, a world of such niceties as the flawless courtesy of Mr. Winscombe discussing with her the unhappy passion of the Princess Caroline for Lord Hervey.

Howat Penny thought sombrely of love, of the emotion that had brought—­or betrayed?—­Isabel Howat so far away from her birthright.  It had gripped his sister no less tyrannically; stripping them, he considered, of their essential liberty.  The thing was clear enough in his mind—­nothing more than an animal instinct, humiliating to the human individual, to breed.  It was the mere repetition of nature through the working of an automatic law.  No such obscure fate, he determined, should overtake, obliterate, him.  Yet it had involved his mother, a person of the first superiority.  A slight chill, as if a breath of imminent winter had touched him, communicated itself to his heart.

A trivial conversation was in progress across the table between Mrs. Winscombe and Myrtle.  The latter was an embodiment of the familiar Saxon type of beauty; her hair was fair, infinitely pale gold, her complexion a delicately mingled crimson and white, her eyes as candidly blue as flowers.  Her features were finely moulded, and her shoulders, slipping out from azure lutestring, were like smooth handfuls of meringue.  Her voice was always formal, and it sounded stilted, forced, in comparison with Mrs. Winscombe’s easy periods.