most of our time, then. Suppose we go into the garden,
Tom, and walk across the street to the river--I don't have to put
anything on for just that step. It's so pretty, looking upstream at the
bridges, and across at the hills your pa was so fond of. Wasn't the
Judge just crazy about Florence! For the longest time after I came I
couldn't see why, but I'm beginning."

CHAPTER XX

A tired look overspread Estelle's face, when, returning home after
seeing Dr. Bewick off on his way to Paris, they found Gerald waiting.

She said to herself, in tempestuous inward irritation, that it was
inconceivable a young man so well up in the ways of the world shouldn't
know any better.

It could not be said that Estelle did not like Gerald Fane. Considered
by himself, she did like him, much more, she believed, than he liked
her. His odd distinction, too subtle and complex to describe, aroused in
her a vague hunger of the mind. But considered in relation to Aurora, he
"was on her nerves," she said.

"That he shouldn't know any better--" she mentally scolded, behind her
tired look, "than to obtrude himself the very first minute after Doctor
Tom's departure!"

But Gerald was not thinking he showed a horrid want of tact. The other
way, rather. He saw himself as the intimate old friend who comes to call
right after the funeral, and by his presence console a little, and
brighten, the bereaved.

Aurora's red eyes smote him at once. Aurora was still in tearful mood.
The sense not only of her dear friend going, but going with a secret
weight on his heart that it had been in her power to prevent, made her
own heart miserably heavy, too. For the moment Tom counted for her more
than all else, and she reproached herself that when he had done so much
for her she had not been willing to do such an ordinary little thing for
him as to marry him; and she reproached herself because it was a relief,
despite her great wish to be loyal, to think they should not meet again
until all that was well in the past.

Estelle hoped to hear her friend say to Gerald something to the effect
that she was in no mood for a social call; but Aurora welcomed the
visitor with unaffected warmth and sat down in her hat to talk with him.
So Estelle said primly that it was late, and she was tired; if they
would excuse her, she would go to bed.

Aurora talked about Tom and nothing but Tom. Sweetly, sighfully, she
spoke, as more than once before, of those many thing