“Don’t say such things!” he said angrily.

“The world would say them—­your friends—­perhaps Geraldine might be led to doubt—­Oh, Scott, dear, I know, I know!  And above all—­I am afraid.  There are too many years between us—­too many blessed memories of my children to risk....  Don’t try to make me care for you in any other way.”

A quick flame leaped in his eyes.

“Could I?”

“No!” she exclaimed, appalled.

“Then why do you ask me not to try?  I believe I could!”

“You cannot!  You cannot, believe me.  Won’t you believe me?  It must not happen; it is all wrong—­in every way——­”

He stood looking at her with a new expression on his face.

“If you are so alarmed,” he said slowly, “you must have already thought about it.  You’ll think about it now, anyway.”

“We are both going to forget it.  Promise that you will!” She added hurriedly:  “Drop my hand, please; there is Geraldine—­and Mr. Grandcourt, too!...  Tell me—­do my eyes look queer?  Are they red and horrid?...  Don’t look at me that way.  For goodness’ sake, don’t display any personal interest in me.  Go and turn over some flat rocks and find some lizards!”

Geraldine, bare-armed and short-skirted, came swinging along the woodland path, Delancy Grandcourt dogging her heels, as usual, carrying a pair of rods and catching the artificial flies in the bushes at every step.

“We’re all out of trout at the house!” she called across to the stream to her brother.  “Jack Dysart is fishing down the creek with Naida and Sylvia.  Where is Duane?”

“Somewhere around, I suppose,” replied Scott sulkily.  His sister took a running jump, cleared the bank, and alighted on a rock in the stream.  Poised there she looked back at Grandcourt, laughed, sprang forward from stone to stone, and leaped to the moss beside Kathleen.

“Hello, dear!” she nodded.  “Where did you cross?  And where is Duane?”

“We crossed by the log bridge below,” replied Kathleen.  She added:  “Duane left us half an hour ago.  Wasn’t it half an hour ago, Scott?” with a rising inflection that conveyed something of warning, something of an appeal.  But on Scott’s face the sullen disconcerted expression had not entirely faded, and his sister inspected him curiously.  Then without knowing why, exactly, she turned and looked at Kathleen.

There was a subdued and dewy brilliancy in Kathleen’s eyes, a bright freshness to her cheeks, radiantly and absurdly youthful; and something else—­something so indefinable, so subtle, that only another woman’s instinct might divine it—­something invisible and inward, which transfigured her with a youthful loveliness almost startling.

They looked at one another.  Geraldine, conscious of something she could not understand, glanced again at her sulky brother.

“What’s amiss, Scott?” she asked.  “Has anything gone wrong anywhere?”