She opened it at random and read:  “July 5, 1893, Picnic at Psalter’s Falls.  Temperature 71 at 9 A.M.  Bar. 30.  Weather clear.  Charles left for Washington, summons from President, in the midst of it.  Agatha and Victor again look at the Farrar property.  Hugh has a ducking.  P.S.  At dinner night Bessie announces her engagement to Cecil Grainger.  Present Sarah and George Grenfell, Agatha and Victor Strange, Gerald Shorter, Lord Kylie—­”

Honora looked up.  Hugh was at her shoulder, with his eyes on the page.

“Psalter’s Falls!” he exclaimed.  “How well I remember that day!  I was just home from my junior year at Harvard.”

“Who was ’Charles’?” inquired Honora.

“Senator Pendleton—­Bessie’s father.  Just after I jumped into the mill-pond the telegram came for him to go to Washington, and I drove him home in my wet clothes.  The old man had a terrible tongue, a whip-lash kind of humour, and he scored me for being a fool.  But he rather liked me, on the whole.  He told me if I’d only straighten out I could be anything, in reason.”

“What made you jump in the mill-pond?” Honora asked, laughing.

“Bessie Grainger.  She had a devil in her, too, in those days, but she always kept her head, and I didn’t.”  He smiled.  “I’m willing to admit that I was madly in love with her, and she treated me outrageously.  We were standing on the bridge—­I remember it as though it were yesterday —­and the water was about eight feet deep, with a clear sand bottom.  She took off a gold bracelet and bet me I wouldn’t get it if she threw it in.  That night, right in the middle of dinner, when there was a pause in the conversation, she told us she was engaged to Cecil Grainger.  It turned out, by the way, to have been his bracelet I rescued.  I could have wrung his neck, and I didn’t speak to her for a month.”

Honora repressed an impulse to comment on this incident.  With his arm over her shoulder, he turned the pages idly, and the long lists of guests which bore witness to the former life and importance of Highlawns passed before her eyes.  Distinguished foreigners, peers of England, churchmen, and men renowned in literature:  famous American statesmen, scientists, and names that represented more than one generation of wealth and achievement—­all were here.  There were his school and college friends, five and six at a time, and besides them those of young girls who were now women, some of whom Honora had met and known in New York or Newport.

Presently he closed the book abruptly and returned it to the safe.  To her sharpened senses, the very act itself was significant.  There were other and blank pages in it for future years; and under different circumstances he might have laid it in its time-honoured place, on the great table in the library.