As for Vincent Farley, the real man, Ardea’s appraisal of him was not greatly at fault.  He was tall, like his father, but there the resemblance paused.  The promoter’s shifty blue eyes were always at the point of lighting up with enthusiasm; the son’s, of precisely the same hue, were cold and calmly calculating.  The human polyhedron has as many facets as a curiously-cut gem, and Vincent Farley’s gift lay in the ability always to present the same side to the same person.  His attitude toward Ardea had always been a pose; but it was a pose maintained so faithfully that it had become one of the facets of the polyhedron.  Such men do not love, as a woman defines love; they merely have the mating instinct.  And even lust finds a cold hearth in such hearts, though on occasion it will rake the embers together and make shift to blow them into some brief, fierce flame.  At times, Farley’s thought of Ardea was libertine; but oftener she figured as the woman who would grace the home of affluence, giving it charm and tone.  Also, he had an affection for the Dabney manorial acres, and especially for that portion of them overlying the coal measures.

The pose-facet was at the precisely effective angle when he came to Paris as his sister’s messenger and pictured, with what warmth there was in him, the delights in the prospect of a Neapolitan winter.  But Ardea, shrinking from a six months’ guesting with any one, said no, and told her grandfather she was ready to go home.

The start was from Havre, and Vincent, with time on his hands, was her companion on the railway journey, her courrier du place in the embarkation, and her faithful shadow up to the instant when the warning cry for the shore-goers rang through the ship.  It was scarcely a moment for sentimental passages, and under the most favoring conditions, Vincent Farley was something less than sentimental.  Yet he found time to declare himself in conventional fashion, modestly asking only for the right to hope.

Ardea was not ready to give an answer, even to the tentative question; yet she did it—­was, in a manner, surprised into doing it.  For the young woman who has not loved, it is easy to doubt the existence of the seventh Heaven, or at least to reckon without its possibilities.  At the very crucial moment the clear-sighted inner self was assuring her that this cold-eyed young man, who walked in the paths of righteousness because he found them easier and pleasanter than the way of the transgressor, was at best only a mildly exciting apotheosis of the negative virtues.  But the negative virtues, failing to score brilliantly, nevertheless have the advantage of continuous innings.  Ardea was turned twenty in the year of the European holiday, and she had—­or believed she had—­her heritage of the Dabney impetuosity well in hand.  Vincent’s self-restraint was admirable, and his gentle deference, conventional as it was, rose almost to the height of sentiment.  So she gave him his answer; gave him her hand at parting, and stood dutifully fluttering her handkerchief for him while the liner drew out of its slip and pointed its prow toward the headlands.