“Dirt breeds roses,” said Kathleen.  “Oh, look, dear, how earnest he is about it.  What a boy he is, after all!  So serious and intent, and so touchingly confident!”

Geraldine nodded listlessly, considering her brother’s evolutions with his trowel and weeder where he lay flat on his stomach, absorbed in his investigations.

“Why does he get so grubby?” she said.  “All his coat-pockets are permanently out of shape.  The other day I was looking through them, at his request, to find one of my own handkerchiefs which he had taken, and oh, horrors! a caterpillar, forgotten, had spun a big cocoon in one of them!”

She shuddered, but in Kathleen’s laughter there was a tremor of tenderness born of that shy pride which arises from possession.  For it was now too late, if it had not always been too late, for any criticism of this boy of hers.  Perfect he had always been, wondrous to her, as a child, for the glimpses of the man developing in him; perfect, wonderful, adorable now for the glimpses of the child which she caught so constantly through the man’s character now forming day by day under her loyal eyes.  Everything masculine in him she loved or pardoned proudly—­even his egotism, his slapdash self-confidence, his bullying of her, his domination, his exacting demands.  But this new humility—­this sudden humble doubt that he might not be worthy of her, filled her heart with delicious laughter and a delight almost childish.

So she watched him from the parapet, chin cupped in both palms, bright hair blowing, one shoulder almost hidden under the drooping scarlet nasturtiums pendant from the carved stone urn above; a fair, sweet, youthful creature, young as her guiltless heart, sweet as her conscience, fair as the current of her stainless life.

And beside her, seated sideways, brown eyes brooding, sat a young girl, delicately lovely, already harassed, already perplexed, already bruised and wearied by her first skirmishes with life; not yet fully understanding what threatened, what lay before—­alas! what lay behind her—­even to the fifth generation.

They were to motor to Lenox after luncheon.  Before that—­and leaving Scott absorbed in his grubbing, and Kathleen absorbed in watching him—­Geraldine wandered back into the library and took down a book—­a book which had both beguiled and horrified the solitude of her self-imprisonment.  It was called “Simpson on Heredity.”

There were some very hideous illustrated pages in that book; she turned to them with a fearful fascination which had never left her since she first read them.  They dealt with the transmission of certain tendencies through successive generations.

That the volume was an old one and amusingly out of date she did not realise, as her brown eyes widened over terrifying paragraphs and the soft tendrils of her glossy hair almost bristled.

She had asked Kathleen about it, and Kathleen had asked Dr. Bailey, who became very irritated and told Geraldine that anybody except a physician who ever read medical works was a fool.  Desperation gave her courage to ask him one more question; his well-meant reply silenced her.  But she had the book under her pillow.  It is better to answer such questions when the young ask them.