They had reached the gate beyond the monument, and swinging suddenly round, she started back toward the house.  As she passed him he touched the end of her fur stole with a gesture that was almost imperative.  His eyes had dropped their veil of pleasantry, and she was aware, with a troubled mind, that he was holding back something as a last resource if she continued to prove intractable.  Again and again she had this feeling when she was with him—­an uneasy intuition that his good humour was not entirely unassumed, that he was concealing a dangerous weapon beneath his offensive familiarity.

“After all I may be going to surprise you,” he said lightly enough, yet with this disturbing implication of some meaning that she could not discern.  “What if I tell you that I’ve no intention of making love to you?”

“You mean there is something else you want to see me about?” She breathed a sigh of relief, and her light steps fell gradually into the measure of his.  Her conscience pricked her unpleasantly when she remembered that there had been a time when she would have spoken less curtly.  Well, what of that?  It was characteristic of her energetic mind that past mistakes were dismissed as soon as they were discovered.  When one started out in life knowing nothing, one had to learn as best one could, that was all!  Every day was a new one, so why bother about yesterday?  There was trouble enough in the world as it was, without dragging back what was over.

“Please tell me what it is,” she said impatiently.

He looked at her with curious intentness.  “It is about an aunt of yours—­Mrs. Green.  I met her when I was in California.”

Her surprise was so complete that he must have been gratified.

“An aunt of mine?  I haven’t any aunt.”

For a minute he hesitated.  Now that he had come to practical matters his careless jocularity had given place to a manner of serious deliberation.  “Then your father hasn’t told you?” he asked.

“Is she his sister?” Her distrust of Gershom was so strong that she could not bring herself to a direct reply.

“So he hasn’t?” After all she might as well have answered his question.  “No, she isn’t his sister.”  His smile was full of meaning.

“Then she must be”—­there was a change in her voice which he was quick to detect—­“she must be the sister of my mother.”

“Didn’t you know that she had one?” he enquired.  “Don’t you remember seeing her when you were a child?”

She shook her head.  “No, I don’t remember her, and Father has never spoken of her.”

At this he glanced at her sharply, and then looked away over the tops of the trees to the political mausoleum of the City Hall.  “We take that as a sort of joke now,” he remarked irrelevantly, “but the time was—­and not so long ago either—­when we boasted of it more than of the Lee monument.  Cost a lot too, they say!  Queer, ain’t it, the way we spend a million dollars or more on a thing one year, and the next want to kick it out on the junk heap?  I reckon it’s the same way about behaviour too.  It ain’t so much what you do as the time you do it in that seems to make the difference.”  As she showed no inclination to follow this train of moralizing, he asked suddenly, “Do you remember your mother?”