moments when she surprised Susan by her penetrating insight into the
character of her parents, and this insight, which was emotional rather
than intellectual, had enabled her to dominate them almost from infancy.

Silence fell between them, while they gazed through the veil of twilight
at the marble shaft above the grave of the Confederate soldier. Then
suddenly Susan spoke in a constrained voice, without turning her head.

"Jinny, Oliver isn't one bit of a hero--not the kind of hero we used to
talk about." It was with difficulty, urged by a vigorous and
uncompromising conscience, that she had uttered the words.

"And besides," retorted Virginia merrily, "he is in love with Abby
Goode."

"I don't believe that. They stayed in the same boarding-house once, and
you know how Abby is about men."

"Yes, I know, and it's just the way men are about Abby."

"Well, Oliver isn't, I'm sure. I don't believe he's ever given her more
than a thought, and he told me last night that he couldn't abide a
bouncing woman."

"Does Abby bounce?"

"You know she does--dreadfully. But it wasn't because of Abby that I
said what I did."

Something quivered softly between them, and a petal from the Jacqueminot
rose in Virginia's hair fluttered like a crimson moth out into the
twilight. "Was it because of him, then?" she asked in a whisper.

For a moment Susan did not answer. Her gaze was on the flight of steps,
and drawing Virginia with her, she began to walk slowly toward the
terraced side of the garden. An old lamplighter, carrying his ladder to
a lamp-post at the corner, smiled up at them with his sunken toothless
mouth as he went by.

"Partly, darling," said Susan. "He is so--I don't know how to make you
understand--so unsettled. No, that isn't exactly what I mean."

Her fine, serious face showed clear and pale in the twilight. From the
high forehead, under the girlish fringe of fair hair, to the thin, firm
lips, which were too straight and colourless for beauty, it was the
face of a woman who could feel strongly, but whose affections would
never blur the definite forms or outlines of life. She looked out upon
the world with level, dispassionate eyes in which there was none of
Virginia's uncritical, emotional softness. Temperamentally she was
uncompromisingly honest in her attitude toward the universe, which
appeared to her, not as it did to Virginia, in mere formless masses of
colour out of which people and objects emerged like fi