Cupid lay very flat on his back, his face turned to the open window.  He had ceased to moan.  When Mrs. Chester stole to where, by leaning over, she could see his eyes they were closed.  She hoped he slept, but sat down in uncertainty rather than risk waking him.  In the moonlit garden Aline and Geoffry paced to and fro.  To see them his mother would have to stand and lean over the cot, and neither good mothers nor good nurses do that.  She kept her seat, anxiously hoping that the moonlight out there would remain soft enough to veil the worn look which daylight betrayed on her son’s face whenever he fell into silence.

The talk of the pair was labored.  Once they went clear to the bower and turned, without a word.  Then Geoffry said:  “I know a story I’d like to tell you, though how it would help us in our project—­if we now have a project at all—­I don’t see.”

“’Tis of the vieux carre, that story?”

“It’s of the vieux carre of the world’s heart.”

“I think I know it.”

“May I not tell it?”

“Yes, you may tell it—­although—­yes, tell it.”

“Well, there was once a beautiful girl, as beautiful in soul as in countenance, and worshipped by a few excellent friends, few only because of conditions in her life that almost wholly exiled her from society.  Even so, she had suitors—­good, gallant men; not of wealth, yet with good prospects and with gifts more essential.  But other conditions seemed, to her, to forbid marriage.”

“Yes,” Aline interrupted.  “Mr. Chester, have you gone in partnership with Mr. Castanado—­’Masques et Costumes’?  Or would it not be maybe better honor to me—­and yourself—­to speak——­”

“Straight out?  Yes, of course.  Aline, I’ve been racking my brain—­I still am—­and my heart—­to divine what it is that separates us.  I had come to believe you loved me.  I can’t quite stifle the conviction yet.  I believe that in refusing me you’re consciously refusing that which seems to you yourself a worthy source of supreme happiness if it did not threaten the happiness of others dearer than your own.”

“Of my aunts, you think?”

“Yes, your aunts.”

“Mr. Chester, even if I had no aunts——­”

“Yes, I see.  That’s my new discovery:  you’ve already had my assurance that I’d study their happiness as I would yours, ours, mine; but you think I could never make your aunts and myself happy in the same atmosphere.  You believe in me.  You believe I have a future that must carry me—­would carry us—­into a world your aunts don’t know and could never learn.”

“’Tis true.  And yet even if my aunts——­”