always undervalued the virtues claimed by gentle birth, and she
looked at him, amazed. He understood, and laughed a little. His best
weapon against the aristocrat had been tolerance, at its mildest, or a
gentle scorn. Where a mob threw eggs, he tossed a rounded epithet.

"I know," he said, "you think I laugh at breeding. Not in her. She had
its rarest virtues. She was like an old portrait come to life. She
couldn't think of her own advantage. She couldn't lie. Ah, well! well!"

He seemed to be musing over the sadness of things begun and ended all
too soon, over a light quenched, a glory gone. Rose found herself
passionately anxious to hear more. He had brought her a jewel, a part of
her heritage; she might have seen it, but without knowing how bright it
was. She was acquiescing, too, in the old spell of his kindness, but
never, it seemed to her, so beguilingly administered: for he had come,
like a herald accredited by an impeccable authority--the talisman of her
mother's name. He was, she thought from his voice, gently amused, even
smiling a little to himself.

"You see, Rose, your mother made a bad match. Her people, the few there
were, repudiated her. I had no qualifications. I was a poor scribbler,
too big, too robust, too everything to suit them. I breathed up all the
air. I just went into their stained-glass seclusions and carried her
off. They never forgave me."

"Her father died very soon?" She had never referred to the two old
people as her grandparents. She found, in her emotional treasury, no
right to them, even as a memory. This hesitating question, indeed,
seemed a liberty, as it subtly brought them nearer.

"Yes. Your mother was prostrated by that. She had a strong sense of
family feeling."

Immediately Rose pictured to herself the wonder of having such clinging
tendrils, to aspire upward, and such filaments of root, to mingle with
kindred roots in a tended ground. Until now it had seemed to her brave
and desirable to walk alone without inherited ties, the cool wind
breathing about her, unchecked by walls of old restraint. Now, whether
he was gently guiding her thoughts toward his desired ends, or whether
some actual hunger in her was impelling them to seek lost possibilities,
she did not know; but she was sad. She wanted the spacious boughs of a
tree of family life to sit under, to play there and rest. He was
continuing,--

"Above all, your mother was a woman of great loyalties, not only to
indivi