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ailed. Now, however, there was Trennahan to take his place. Don Roberto would enjoy life once more, a second youth. He was almost happy. If he felt his will rotting, he would transfer all his vast interests to Trennahan in trust for his wife and daughter, retaining a large income. He did not believe, at this optimistic period, that there was any real danger, after an inflexible resistance of thirty years; but he also realised for the first time what the strain of those thirty years had been. Helena, dazzlingly fair in a frock of forest green, and surrounded by five new admirers, three Eastern and two English tourists, awaited Magdalena on the verandah. The strangers gave Magdalena a faint shock: being the only well-dressed men she had ever seen except Trennahan, they assumed a family likeness to him, and seemed to steal something of his preeminence among men. She commented distantly on this fact as she went up the stair with Helena. "Oh, your little tin god on wheels is not the only one," replied Helena, the astute. "There are five here with possibilities besides dress, and more coming to-morrow. They _are_ such a relief! If I feel real wicked to-morrow night--well, never mind!" "Helena! You will not make those four young men any more miserable than they are now?" Helena shook her head. She was looking very naughty. "Four months, my dear! I didn't realise what I had endured until I had this sudden vacation. Two days of blissful rest, and then the variations for which I was born." They were in Helena's room, and Magdalena sat down by the open window, where she could smell the cypresses, and regarded her beloved friend more critically than was her habit. "I wonder if you will ever mature,--get any heart?" she said. "'Lena! What do you mean! Heart? Don't I love you and my father; and the other girls--some?" "I don't mean that kind. Nor falling in love, either. I never expressed myself very well, but you know what I mean." "Oh, bother. What were men and women made for but to amuse each other?" "Life isn't all play." "It is for a time--when you're young. I am sure that that is what Nature intended, and that the people who don't see it are those who make the mistakes with their lives. Otherwise life would be simply outrageous,--no balance, no compensation. After a certain age even fools become serious: they can't help it, for life begins to take its revenge for permitting them to be young at all, and
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