dered why he had
not asked for one of her pictures, and felt anxious lest he should
have seen the nudge.

"Well," she said to herself, "if he finds any fault with anything
that my mother has done, I don't want him to have one."

Robert stayed a long time. He kept thinking that he ought to go, and
also that he was bored, and yet he felt a singular unwillingness to
leave, possibly because of his sense that the visit was in a measure
forbidden by prudence. The longer he remained, the prettier Ellen
looked to him. New beauties of line and color seemed to grow
apparent in the soft glow from the hideous lamp. There was a
wonderful starry radiance in her eyes now and then, and when she
turned her head her eyeballs gleamed crimson and her hair seemed to
toss into flame. When she spoke, he was conscious of unknown depths
of sweetness in her voice, and it was so with her smile and her
every motion. There was about the girl a mystery, not of darkness
but of light, which seemed to draw him on and on and on without
volition. And yet she said nothing especially remarkable, for Ellen
was only a young girl, reared in a little provincial city in common
environments. She would have been a great genius had she more than
begun to glimpse the breadth and freedom of the outer world through
her paling of life. She was too young and too unquestioning of what
she had learned from her early loves.

"Have you always lived here in Rowe?" asked Lloyd.

"Yes," said she. "I was born here, and I have lived here ever
since."

"And you have never been away?"

"Only once. Once I went to Dragon Beach and stayed a fortnight with
mother." She said this with a visible sense of its importance.
Dragon Beach was some ten miles from Rowe, a cheap seashore place,
built up with flimsy summer cottages of factory hands. Andrew had
hired one for a fortnight once when Ellen was ailing, and it had
been the event of a lifetime to the family. They hereafter dated
from the year "we went to Dragon Beach."

Lloyd looked with a quick impulse of compassionate tenderness at
this child who had been away from Rowe once to Dragon Beach. He had
his own impressions of Dragon Beach and also of Rowe.

"I suppose you enjoyed that?" said he.

"Very much. The sea is beautiful."

So, after all, it was the sea which she had cared for at Dragon
Beach, and not the clam-bakes and merry-go-rounds and women in
wrappers in the surf. Robert felt rebuked for thinking of anything
b