“Did you ever hear any queer stories about him?  Was he—­well—­ah, wild, would you say?”

“Wild?  Jonathan, I am surprised at you!  Why, during the twenty years that I knew him he never let fall so much as a single indelicate word in my presence.”

“I don’t mean that exactly—­but what about his relations with the women around here?”

She flinched as if his words had struck her a blow.

“Dear Jonathan, your poor uncle would never have asked such a question.”

Above the mantel there was an oil portrait of the elder Jonathan at the age of three, painted astride the back of an animal that disported the shape of a lion under the outward covering of a lamb.

“Ah, that’s just it,” commented Gay, while his inquiring look hung on the picture.  After a minute of uncertainty, his curiosity triumphed over his discretion and he put, in an apologetic tone, an equally indelicate question.  “What about old Reuben Merryweather’s granddaughter?  Has she been provided for?”

For an instant Mrs. Gay looked at him with shining, reproachful eyes under a loosened curl of fair hair which was threaded with sliver.  Those eyes, very blue, very innocent, seemed saying to him, “Oh, be careful, I am so sensitive.  Remember that I am a poor frail creature, and do not hurt me.  Let me remain still in my charmed circle where I have always lived, and where no unpleasant reality has ever entered.”  The quaint peacock screen, brought from China by old Jonathan, cast a shadow on her cheek, which was flushed to the colour of a faded rose leaf.

“Yes, the girl is an orphan, it is very sad,” she replied, and her tone added, “but what can I do about it?  I am a woman and should know nothing of such matters!”

“Was she mentioned in my uncles’s will, do you remember?”

His handsome, well-coloured face had taken a sudden firmness of outline, and even the sagging flesh of his chin appeared to harden with the resolve of the moment.  Across his forehead, under the fine dark hair which had worn thin on the temples, three frowning wrinkles leaped out as if in response to some inward pressure.

“There was something—­I can’t remember just what it was—­Mr. Chamberlayne will tell you about it when he comes down to-morrow to talk over business with Kesiah.  They keep all such things away from me out of consideration for my heart.  But I’ve never doubted for an instant that your uncle did everything that was just and generous in the matter.  He sent the girl to a good school in Applegate, I remember, and there was a bequest of some sort, I believe—­something that she comes into on her twenty-first birthday.”

“She isn’t twenty-one then, is she?”

“I don’t know, Jonathan, I really can’t remember.”

“Perhaps Aunt Kesiah can tell me something about her?”

“Oh, she can and she will—­but Kesiah is so violent in all her opinions!  I had to ask her never to mention Brother Jonathan’s name to me because she made me quite ill once by some dreadful hints she let fall about him.”