country at which Europe has never ceased to wonder, and to give her history would no more account for her than the process of manufacture explains the most delicate of scents.  Her poise, her quick detection of sham in others not so fortunate, her absolute conviction that all things were as they ought to be; her charity, her interest in its recipients; her smile, which was kindness itself; her delicate features, her white skin with its natural bloom; the grace of her movements, and her hair, which had a different color in changing lights—­such an ensemble is not to be depicted save by a skilled hand.

The late Mr. Larrabbee’s name was still printed on millions of bright labels encircling cubes of tobacco, now manufactured by a Trust.  However, since the kind that entered Mrs. Larrabbee’s house, or houses, was all imported from Egypt or Cuba, what might have been in the nature of an unpleasant reminder was remote from her sight, and she never drove into the northern part of the city, where some hundreds of young women bent all day over the cutting-machines.  To enter too definitely into Mrs. Larrabbee’s history, therefore, were merely to be crude, for she is not a lady to caricature.  Her father had been a steamboat captain—­once an honoured calling in the city of her nativity—­a devout Presbyterian who believed in the most rigid simplicity.  Few who remembered the gaucheries of Captain Corington’s daughter on her first presentation to his family’s friends could recognize her in the cosmopolitan Mrs. Larrabbee.  Why, with New York and London at her disposal, she elected to remain in the Middle West, puzzled them, though they found her answer, “that she belonged there,” satisfying Grace Larrabbee’s cosmopolitanism was of that apperception that knows the value of roots, and during her widowhood she had been thrusting them out.  Mrs. Larrabbee followed by “of” was much more important than just Mrs. Larrabbee.  And she was, moreover, genuinely attached to her roots.

Her girlhood shyness—­rudeness, some called it, mistaking the effect for the cause—­had refined into a manner that might be characterized as ‘difficile’, though Hodder had never found her so.  She liked direct men; to discover no guile on first acquaintance went a long way with her, and not the least of the new rector’s social triumphs had been his simple conquest.

Enveloped in white flannel, she met his early train at the Ferry; an unusual compliment to a guest, had he but known it, but he accepted it as a tribute to the Church.

“I was so afraid you wouldn’t come,” she said, in a voice that conveyed indeed more than a perfunctory expression.  She glanced at him as he sat beside her on the cushions of the flying motor boat, his strange eyes fixed upon the blue mountains of the island whither they were bound, his unruly hair fanned by the wind.

“Why?” he asked, smiling at the face beneath the flying veil.

“You need the rest.  I believe in men taking their work seriously, but not so seriously as you do.”