nse. If he had cut a sorry figure in the business,
he owed it to her not to close his eyes to the fact any longer...

But when he opened them, what did he see? The situation, detestable at
best, would yet have been relatively simple if protecting Sophy Viner
had been the only duty involved in it. The fact that that duty was
paramount did not do away with the contingent obligations. It was
Darrow's instinct, in difficult moments, to go straight to the bottom
of the difficulty; but he had never before had to take so dark a dive
as this, and for the minute he shivered on the brink...Well, his first
duty, at any rate, was to the girl: he must let her see that he meant to
fulfill it to the last jot, and then try to find out how to square the
fulfillment with the other problems already in his path...

XVI

In the oak room he found Mrs. Leath, her mother-in-law and Effie. The
group, as he came toward it down the long drawing-rooms, composed itself
prettily about the tea-table. The lamps and the fire crossed their
gleams on silver and porcelain, on the bright haze of Effie's hair and
on the whiteness of Anna's forehead, as she leaned back in her chair
behind the tea-urn.

She did not move at Darrow's approach, but lifted to him a deep gaze of
peace and confidence. The look seemed to throw about him the spell of
a divine security: he felt the joy of a convalescent suddenly waking to
find the sunlight on his face.

Madame de Chantelle, across her knitting, discoursed of their
afternoon's excursion, with occasional pauses induced by the hypnotic
effect of the fresh air; and Effie, kneeling, on the hearth, softly but
insistently sought to implant in her terrier's mind some notion of the
relation between a vertical attitude and sugar.

Darrow took a chair behind the little girl, so that he might look across
at her mother. It was almost a necessity for him, at the moment, to
let his eyes rest on Anna's face, and to meet, now and then, the proud
shyness of her gaze.

Madame de Chantelle presently enquired what had become of Owen, and
a moment later the window behind her opened, and her grandson, gun in
hand, came in from the terrace. As he stood there in the lamp-light,
with dead leaves and bits of bramble clinging to his mud-spattered
clothes, the scent of the night about him and its chill on his pale
bright face, he really had the look of a young faun strayed in from the
forest.

Effie abandoned the terrier to fly