ven
comprehend his dwelling upon the immaterial traits of a strange and
indifferent woman; he was at a loss to understand how such inquiries
assailed him. He grew, finally, annoyed, and shut his mind to any
further consideration of her.

Mrs. Penny was talking with charming earnestness to the man on her other
hand. The amber radiance flickered over the beautiful curves of her
shoulders and cast a warm shadow at the base of her throat. She smiled
at her son; and her face, in spite of its present gaiety, held a
definite reminder of her years, almost fifty; but when she turned again
her profile, with slightly tilted nose and delightfully fresh lips and
chin, was that of a girl no older than Caroline. Howat had often noticed
this. It was amazing--with that slight movement she would seem to lose
at once all the years that had accumulated since she was newly married.
In a second she would appear to leave them all, her mature children, the
heavy, palpably aging presence of Gilbert Penny, the house and
obligations that had grown about her, and be remotely young, a stranger
to the irrefutable proof that her youth had gone. At such moments he was
almost reluctant to claim her attention, to bring her again, as it were,
into the present, with so much spent, lapsed: at times he almost
thought, in that connection, wasted.

She had, in addition to her profile, a spirit of youth that had remained
undimmed; as if there were within her a reserve warmth, a priceless
gift, which life had never claimed; and it was the contemplation of that
which gave Howat the impression that Isabel Penny's life had not fully
flowered. He had never known her to express a regret of the way she had
taken; he had never even surprised her in a perceptible retrospective
dejection; but the conviction remained. Gilbert Penny had been an almost
faultless husband, tender and firm and successful; but his wife had come
from other blood and necessities than domestic felicities; she had been
a part of a super-cultivation, a world of such niceties as the flawless
courtesy of Mr. Winscombe discussing with her the unhappy passion of the
Princess Caroline for Lord Hervey.

Howat Penny thought sombrely of love, of the emotion that had
brought--or betrayed?--Isabel Howat so far away from her birthright. It
had gripped his sister no less tyrannically; stripping them, he
considered, of their essential liberty. The thing was clear enough in
his mind--nothing more than an anim