“Is it any more agreeable up there near Canada?”

“Roya-Neh is very lovely—­of course—­but—­it’s certainly not a wise investment, dear.”

“Well, if Scott and I buy it, we’d never wish to sell it——­”

“Suppose you were obliged to?”

Geraldine’s velvet eyes widened lazily: 

“Obliged to?  Oh—­yes—­you mean if we went to smash.”

Then her gaze became remote as she stood slowly tapping her gloved palm with her riding-crop.

“I think I’ll dress,” she said absently.

“Good-bye, then,” nodded Kathleen.

“Good-bye,” said the girl, turning lightly away across the hall.  Kathleen’s eyes followed the slender retreating figure, so slimly compact in its buoyancy.  There was always something fascinatingly boyish in Geraldine’s light, free carriage—­just a touch of carelessness in the poise—­almost a swing at times to the step.  Duane had once said:  “She has a bully walk!” Kathleen thought of it as, passing a mirror, she caught sight of herself.  And the sudden glimpse of her own warm, rich beauty in all its exquisite maturity startled her.  Surely she seemed to be growing younger.

She was.  Dark-violet eyes, ruddy hair, a superb figure, a skin so white that it looked fragrant, made Kathleen Severn amazingly attractive.  Men found her, to their surprise, rather unresponsive.  She was amiable enough, nicely formal, and perfectly bred, it is true, but inclined to that sort of aloofness which is marked by lapses of inattention and the smiling silences of preoccupation.

She had married, very young, an army officer convalescing from Texan fever.  He died suddenly on the very eve of their postponed wedding-trip.  This was enough to account for lapses of inattention in any woman.

But Kathleen Severn had never been demonstrative.  She was slow to care for people.  Besides, the responsibility of bringing up the Seagrave twins had been sufficient to subdue anybody’s spirits.  She was only nineteen and a widow of a month when her distant relative, Magnelius Grandcourt, found her the position as personal guardian of the twins, then aged nine.  Now they were twenty-one and she thirty-one; twelve years of service, twelve years of steady fidelity, which long ago had become a changeless and passionate devotion, made up of all she might have given to the dead, and of the unborn happiness she had never known.  What other sort of love, if there was any, lay within her undeveloped, nobody knew because nobody had ever aroused it.

Sunshine transformed into great golden transparencies the lowered shades in the living room where Geraldine stood, pensive, distraite, idly twirling her crop by the loop.  Presently it flew off her gloved forefinger and fell clattering across the carpetless floor.  She bathed and dressed leisurely; later, when luncheon was brought to her, she dropped into a low, wide chair and, ignoring everything except the strawberries, turned her face to the breeze which was softly rattling the southern curtains.