t even _see_ how beautiful he is, much less talk
about it."

"And I like to talk about it so much!"

"You do it to please me," said Garda, gratefully. "I appreciate that."

"She tells me she talks to you--I mean, of course, about Lucian
Spenser--just as she does to me," he said to Margaret one day; "she has
chosen to confide her little secrets to you and me alone." Margaret was
standing by a table in the eyrie's dining-room, arranging in two brown
jugs a mass of yellow jessamine which she had brought in from the
barrens. "Rather a strange choice," he went on, smiling a little as he
thought of himself, and then of Margaret, reserved, taciturn, gentle
enough, but (so he had always felt) cold and unsympathetic.

"Yes," assented Margaret. "What do you think the best way to receive
it?" she added, going on with her combinations of green and gold.

"Not to bluff her off--to let her talk on. It is only a fancy, of
course, a girl's fancy; but it needs an outlet, and we are a safe one,
because we know how to take it--know what it amounts to."

"What does it amount to?"

"Nothing."

"Oh," murmured the woman at the table, rather protestingly.

"I mean that it will end in nothing, it will soon fade. But it shows
that the child has imagination; Garda Thorne will love, some of these
days; a real love."

"Yes; that requires imagination."

"My sentences were not connected, they did not describe each other. What
I meant was that the way the child has gone into this--this little
beginning--shows that she will be capable of deep feelings later on."

Margaret did not reply.

"There are plenty of excellent women who are quite incapable of them,"
pursued Winthrop, conscious that he had, as he expressed it to himself,
taken the bit in his teeth again, but led on by the temptation which,
more and more this winter, Margaret's controlled silences (they always
seemed controlled) were becoming to him. "And the curious point is that
they never suspect their own deficiencies; they think that if they
bestow a prim, well-regulated little affection upon the man they honor
with their choice, that is all that is necessary; certainly it is all
that the man deserves. I don't know what we deserve; but I do know that
we are not apt to be much moved by such affection as that. They are
often very good mothers," he added, following here another of his
tendencies, the desire to be just--a tendency which often brought him
out at the end of a remar