theories had crumbled.  He might come back to her again—­she might go forth to meet him—­but the bloom had gone from their dreams—­in the reunion she saw neither permanence nor abiding.  The strongest of her instincts—­the one that made for the blood she bore—­had quivered beneath the onslaught of his accusation, but had not bent.  Wherever and whenever the struggle came she stood, as the Battles had always stood, for the clan.  Be it right or wrong, true or false, it was hers and she was on its side.

As she went beneath the great cedars, their long branches brushed her face, like the remembering touch of familiar fingers, and she put up her cheek to them as if they were sentient things.  Long ago they had soothed her as a troubled child, and now their caresses cooled her fever.  Underfoot she felt the ancient carpet they had spread throughout the century—­and it smoothed the way for her heavy feet.  She was in the state of subjective passiveness when the consciousness of external objects alone seems awake.  She felt a tenderness for the twisted box bushes she brushed in passing, a vague pity for a sickly moth that flew into her face; but for herself she was without pity or tenderness—­she had not brought her mind to bear upon her own hurt.

Indoors she found the family at supper.  The general, hearing her step, called her to her seat and gave her the brownest chicken breast in the dish before him.  Miss Chris offered her the contents of the cream jug, and Congo plied her with Aunt Verbeny’s lightest waffles; but the food choked her and she could not eat.  A lump rose in her throat, and she saw the kindly, accustomed faces through a gathering mist.  She regarded each with a certain intentness, a peculiar feeling that there were hidden traits in the commonplace features which she had never seen before—­a complexity in the benign candour of Miss Chris’s countenance, in the overwrought youthfulness of Bernard’s, in the apoplectic credulity of the general’s.  Familiar as they were, it seemed to her that there were latent possibilities—­obscure tendencies, which were revealed to her now with microscopic exaggeration.

The general put his hand to her forehead and smoothed back the moist hair.

“Ain’t you well, daughter?” he asked anxiously.  “Would you like a toddy?”

“It’s nothing,” said Miss Chris cheerfully.  “She’s walked too far, that’s all.  Eugie, you must go to bed early.”

“I had her out all the morning in the sun,” put in Bernard, with an affectionate nod at Eugenia, “and she’s such a trump she wouldn’t give out.”

“You must learn to consider your sister,” said his father testily.

“Oh!  I liked it, papa,” declared Eugenia.  “I’m well and—­I’m hungry.”

Congo brought more waffles, and she ate one with grim determination.  The alert affection which surrounded her—­which proved sensitive to a change of colour or a tremor of voice, filled her with a swift sense of security.  She felt a sudden impulse to draw nearer in the shelter of the race—­to cling more closely to that unswerving instinct which had united individual to individual and generation to generation.