s something fascinatingly boyish
in Geraldine's light, free carriage--just a touch of carelessness in the
poise--almost a swing at times to the step. Duane had once said: "She
has a bully walk!" Kathleen thought of it as, passing a mirror, she
caught sight of herself. And the sudden glimpse of her own warm, rich
beauty in all its exquisite maturity startled her. Surely she seemed to
be growing younger.

She was. Dark-violet eyes, ruddy hair, a superb figure, a skin so white
that it looked fragrant, made Kathleen Severn amazingly attractive. Men
found her, to their surprise, rather unresponsive. She was amiable
enough, nicely formal, and perfectly bred, it is true, but inclined to
that sort of aloofness which is marked by lapses of inattention and the
smiling silences of preoccupation.

She had married, very young, an army officer convalescing from Texan
fever. He died suddenly on the very eve of their postponed
wedding-trip. This was enough to account for lapses of inattention in
any woman.

But Kathleen Severn had never been demonstrative. She was slow to care
for people. Besides, the responsibility of bringing up the Seagrave
twins had been sufficient to subdue anybody's spirits. She was only
nineteen and a widow of a month when her distant relative, Magnelius
Grandcourt, found her the position as personal guardian of the twins,
then aged nine. Now they were twenty-one and she thirty-one; twelve
years of service, twelve years of steady fidelity, which long ago had
become a changeless and passionate devotion, made up of all she might
have given to the dead, and of the unborn happiness she had never known.
What other sort of love, if there was any, lay within her undeveloped,
nobody knew because nobody had ever aroused it.

Sunshine transformed into great golden transparencies the lowered shades
in the living room where Geraldine stood, pensive, distraite, idly
twirling her crop by the loop. Presently it flew off her gloved
forefinger and fell clattering across the carpetless floor. She bathed
and dressed leisurely; later, when luncheon was brought to her, she
dropped into a low, wide chair and, ignoring everything except the
strawberries, turned her face to the breeze which was softly rattling
the southern curtains.

Errant thoughts, light as summer fleece, drifted across her mind. Often,
in such moments, she strove to realise that she was now mistress of
herself; but never could completely.

"For example: if I