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