"
and her fingers strayed amongst the keys and found the melody of the
song he loved so much.

The young traveller at her side was too much of a man, even in his state
of despair, to have expected a woman to lift his burden. If she did, he
did not think of the money she owed him. What he wanted was a soothing
touch to be laid on his heart, and the song in which, not six weeks
before, he had nearly loved his aunt, did what she did not.

The children had gone upstairs. Mrs. Carew sang through the first verse
of the song. As far as she was concerned nothing could have been a
greater relief. The sympathy she did not know how to give, the debt she
had never discharged, the affection she had for Antony, and her own
self-pity, Mrs. Carew threw into her voice, and it shook its tremulo
through him.

He breathed devotedly: "Thank you, _dear_," and raised one of his aunt's
hands to his lips.

Mr. Carew had let himself in with his latchkey, and was within a few
feet of them as his wife finished her song.

CHAPTER XXI

Neither Antony nor Mrs. Carew had the presence of mind to stir. Mrs.
Fairfax said of her brother-in-law that he was a "vain creature whose
pomposity stood in place of dignity." Carew, at all events, came upon a
scene which he had never supposed would confront his eyes. Before him in
his own drawing-room, a whipper-snapper from the South was kissing his
wife's hands. To Carew the South was the heart of sedition, bad morals,
lackadaisical indolence. What the South could not do for him in arousing
his distaste, the word "artist" completed. He said to his wife--

"Is _this_ the way you pass your Sabbath afternoons, Mrs. Carew?"

And before she could murmur, "My _dear_ Henry--" he turned on Fairfax.

"Can't _you_ find anything better to do in New York, sir?" He could not
finish.

Fairfax rose. "Don't say anything you will regret, sir. I kissed my
aunt's hand as I would have kissed my mother's. Not that I need to make
excuse."

Mr. Carew's idea of his own importance, of the importance of everything
that belonged to him, was colossal, and it would have taken more than
this spectacle, unpleasant as it was, to make him fancy his wife
harboured a sentiment for her jackanapes of a nephew. If the tableau he
had had time to observe on his way across the dining-room floor had
aroused his jealousy, that sentiment was less strong that was his anger
and his dislike. Young Fairfax had been a thorn in his side for