“Now that you’ve seen me, I’m not absolutely poisonous, am I, Miss Lily?  You don’t mind my calling you that, do you?  You are my niece.  You have been taught to hate me, of course.”

“Yes,” said Lily, coldly.

“By Jove, the truth from a Cardew!” Then:  “That’s an old habit of mine, damning the Cardews.  I’ll have to try to get over it, if they are going to reestablish family relations.”  He was laughing at her, Lily knew, and she flushed somewhat.

“I wouldn’t make too great an effort, then,” she said.

He smiled again, this time not unpleasantly, and suddenly he threw into his rich Irish voice an unexpected softness.  No one knew better than Jim Doyle the uses of the human voice.

“You mustn’t mind me, Miss Lily.  I have no reason to love your family, but I am very happy that you came here to-day.  My wife has missed her people.  If you’ll run in like this now and then it will do her worlds of good.  And if my being here is going to keep you away I can clear out.”

She rather liked him for that speech.  He was totally unlike what she had been led to expect, and she felt a sort of resentment toward her family for misleading her.  He was a gentleman, on the surface at least.  He had not been over-cordial at first, but then who could have expected cordiality under the circumstances?  In Lily’s defense it should be said that the vicissitudes of Elinor’s life with Doyle had been kept from her always.  She had but two facts to go on:  he had beaten her grandfather as a young man, for a cause, and he held views as to labor which conflicted with those of her family.

Months later, when she learned all the truth, it was too late.

“Of course you’re being here won’t keep me away, if you care to have me come.”

He was all dignity and charm then.  They needed youth in that quiet place.  They ought all to be able to forget the past, which was done with, anyhow.  He showed the first genuine interest she had found in her work at the camp, and before his unexpected geniality the girl opened like a flower.

And all the time he was watching her with calculating eyes.  He was a gambler with life, and he rather suspected that he had just drawn a valuable card.

“Thank you,” he said gravely, when she had finished.  “You have done a lot to bridge the gulf that lies—­I am sure you have noticed it —­between the people who saw service in this war and those who stayed at home.”

Suddenly Lily saw that the gulf between her family and herself was just that, which was what he had intended.

When Elinor came in they were absorbed in conversation, Lily flushed and eager, and her husband smiling, urbane, and genial.

To Lily, Elinor Doyle had been for years a figure of mystery.  She had not seen her for many years, and she had, remembered a thin, girlish figure, tragic-eyed, which eternally stood by a window in her room, looking out.  But here was a matronly woman, her face framed with soft, dark hair, with eyes like her father’s, with Howard Cardew’s ease of manner, too, but with a strange passivity, either of repression or of fires early burned out and never renewed.