ack in his chair and tried to make her forget him.
Between the fire and the shadow he wanted to watch her face from which
he now saw that the beauty he remembered had not faded but had been
transformed. She was beautiful in another way: the brilliant, blooming
girl, fully blown at eighteen, with the dazzling charm of health, no
longer existed in the Duchess of Westboro'. She had refined very much
indeed. The aggressive bearing of the American princess had been
replaced by the colder, more serene hauteur of the English Duchess.
She was evidently a very proud woman, the arch of her brows said so,
and the line of her lips. All her lines were sharper and finer. Her
color, and he could not, as he studied her, quite regret it; her color
was quite gone. Her pallor made her more delicate, and her eyes--it
was in them that Bulstrode thought he saw the greatest change of all;
they were now fixed upon him, there was something melancholy in their
profound and deeply circled gray.

"What rooms will they have given you?" she asked after a moment.
Then--"Wait," she commanded, "I know. The south wing, the Henry IV.
rooms that look into the gardens. I always gave those to the men.
There's something extremely homelike about them, don't you think so?
And have you ever seen anything like those winter roses in that court?
Did any bloom this year? The trellis runs up along the terrace
balustrade--or possibly you don't care for flowers? Of course you
wouldn't as a girl does."

A _girl_--with that face and those eyes? Why, she must have been
talking back ten years. Bulstrode drew a breath.

"I know the roses you mean. It would be difficult to forget them.
Your gardener takes such pride in them. For some reason they are never
gathered; they fall as they hang. The gardener, it so happened, told
me so."

She was looking at him with an intensity almost painful, but she said
nothing further, and after a moment more Bulstrode replied to another
question.

"As it happens I don't occupy the Henry IV. rooms. I have mine quite
on the other side of the castle. Don't they call them the 'West
Rooms'?"

She caught her breath a little, but she was in splendid training with
all her years of English life behind her. Her face, nevertheless,
showed how well she knew those rooms, without the added note in her
voice as she said:

"Oh, those West Rooms--you have those."

And in the quiet that fell as her eyes sought the fire, he quite k