ere not wired like
those David was said to have brought from England, had a not
unsatisfactory swing.

At supper Mrs. Winscombe sat at his left, Caroline and Myrtle had taken
their customary places opposite, the elders had not been disturbed. Mrs.
Winscombe had resumed the animation vanished at noon. She wore green and
white, with plum-coloured ribbons, and a flat shirred cap tied under her
chin. The fluted, clear lawn of her elbow sleeves was like a scented
mist. He was again conscious of the warm seduction, the rare finish, of
her body, like a flushed marble under wide hoops and dyed silk. She was
talking to Myrtle about the Court. "I am in waiting with the Princess
Amelia Sophia," she explained; "I have her stockings. There is a
frightful racket of music and parrots and German, with old Handel
bellowing and the King eternally clinking one piece of gold on another."

Gilbert Penny listened with a tightening of his well shaped lips. "It's
into that chamber pot we pour our sweat and iron," he asserted. Ludowika
Winscombe studied him. "In England," she said, "the American provinces
are supposed to lie hardly beyond the Channel, but here England seems to
be at the other end of the world." Myrtle added, "I'd like it
immensely."

And Howat thought of Ludowika--he thought of her tentatively as
Ludowika--in the brilliant setting of tropical silks and birds.

He considered the change that had overtaken his father, English born, in
the quarter century he had lived in America; the strong allegiance
formed to ideas fundamentally different from those held at St. James;
and he wondered if such a transformation would operate in Ludowika if
she could remain in the Province. It was a fantastic query, and he
impatiently dismissed it, returning to the contemplation of his mother's
problematic happiness. He determined to question the latter if a
permissible occasion arose; suddenly his interest had sharpened toward
her mental situation. He compared the two women, what he could
conjecture about Isabel Howat and Ludowika Winscombe; but something
within him, automatic and certain, whispered that no comparison was
possible. His mother possessed a quality of spirit that he had never
found elsewhere; he could see, in spite of their resemblance of blood
and position, that the elder could never have been merely provocative.
Such distinctions, he divined, were the result of qualities mysterious
and deeply concealed. Love, that he had once dis