other's eyes followed him
anxiously. "Poor boy, we must bear with him," she said in melting
maternal accents.

CHAPTER XIII

CORINNA WONDERS

After a winter of Italian skies spring had come in a night. It was a
morning in April, blue and soft as a cloud, with a roving fragrance of
lilacs and hyacinths in the air. Already the early bloom of the orchard
had dropped, and the freshly ploughed fields, with splashes of henna in
the dun-coloured soil, were surrounded by the budding green of the
woods.

As Mrs. Culpeper knocked at the door of Corinna's shop, she noticed that
the pine bough in the window had been replaced by bowls of growing
narcissi. For a moment her stern expression relaxed, and her face,
framed in a bonnet of black straw with velvet strings, became soft and
anxious. Beneath the veil of white illusion which reached only to the
tip of her small sharp nose, her eyes were suddenly touched with spring.

"How delicious the flowers smell," she remarked when Corinna opened the
door; and then, as she entered the room and glanced curiously round her,
she asked incredulously, "Do people really pay money for these old
illustrations, Corinna?"

"Not here, Cousin Harriet. I bought these in London."

"And they cost you something?"

"Some of these, of course, cost more than others. That," Corinna pointed
to a mezzotint of the Ladies Waldegrave by Valentine Green, "cost a
little less than ten thousand dollars."

"Ten thousand dollars!" Mrs. Culpeper gazed at the print as
disapprovingly as if it were an open violation of the Eighteenth
Amendment. "We didn't pay anything like that for our largest copy of a
Murillo. Well, I may not be artistic, but, for my part, I could never
understand why any one should want an old book or an old picture."
Sitting rigidly upright in one of the tapestry-covered chairs, she added
condescendingly: "Stephen admires this room very much."

"Stephen," remarked Corinna pleasantly, "is a dear boy."

"Just now," returned Stephen's mother, with her accustomed air of duty
unflinchingly performed, "he is giving us a great deal of anxiety. Never
before, not even when he was in the war, have I spent so many sleepless
nights over him."

"I am sorry. Poor Stephen, what has he done?"

"I have always hoped," observed Mrs. Culpeper firmly, "that Stephen
would marry Margaret."

"I am aware of that." A flicker of amusement brightened Corinna's eyes.
"So, I think, is Stephen."

"I have t