Risley had said.  He laughed as he said it, but Harris had colored with an uneasy look at Norman Lloyd, whose face wore an expression of amusement.  “Perhaps I should have,” he began, but Lloyd interrupted him.  “My dear fellow,” he said, “you don’t imagine that any man in his senses could take seriously enough to be annoyed by it that child’s effusion on her nice little roll of foolscap tied with her pretty white satin ribbon?”

“She is just as sweet as she can be,” said Mrs. Norman, “and I thought her composition was real pretty.  Didn’t you, Cynthia?”

“Very,” replied Cynthia.

“What your are worrying about it for, Edward, I don’t see,” said Mrs. Norman to the school-master.

“Well, I am glad if it struck you that way,” said he, “but when I heard the applause from all those factory people”—­he lowered his voice, since a number were sitting near—­“I didn’t know, but—­” He hesitated.

“That the spark that would fire the mine might be in that pretty little beribboned roll of foolscap,” said Risley, laughing.  “Well, it was a very creditable production, and it was written with the energy of conviction.  The Czar and that little school-girl would not live long in one country, if she goes on as she has begun.”

It was then that young Lloyd, who had just come in, and was standing beside the school-master, turned eagerly to him, and asked who the girl was, and begged him to present him.

“Perhaps he’ll fall in love with her,” said Mrs. Norman, directly, when the two men had gone across the hall in quest of Ellen.  Her husband laughed.

“You have not seen your aunt for a long time,” Ellen said to young Lloyd, when they were sitting out a dance after their waltz together.

“Not since—­I—­I came on—­with my father when he died,” he replied.  Again Ellen looked at him with that wonderful pity in her face, and again the young man thought he had never seen such a girl.

“I think your aunt is beautiful,” Ellen said, presently, gazing across at Cynthia.

“Yes, she must have been a beauty when she was young.”

“I think she is now,” said Ellen, quite fervently, for she was able to disabuse her mind of associations and rely upon pure observation, and it was quite true that leaving out of the question Cynthia’s age and the memory of her face in stronger lights at closer view, she was as beautiful from where they sat as some graceful statue.  Only clear outlines showed at that distance, and her soft hair, which was quite white, lay in heavy masses around the intense repose of her face.

“Yes—­s,” admitted Robert, somewhat hesitatingly.  “She used to think everything of me when I was a little shaver,” he said.

“Doesn’t she now?”

“Oh yes, I suppose she does, but it is different now.  I am grown up.  A man doesn’t need so much done for him when he is grown up.”

Then again he looked at Ellen with eyes of pleading which would have made of the older woman what he remembered her to have been in his childhood, and hers answered again.