her. I am
glad he had confidence in my ability to take care of myself, and that
he wasn't worrying over me when he had so much else to think about."

"I wish Simon Varr was more like him!" said Bates.

She made no reply to that, and he withdrew in his noiseless fashion.
She did not immediately dip into the sedative history of the Borgias,
but remained looking at the corner around which he had vanished with
something akin to speculative interest. She was pondering the old
man's revelation of his hatred for Varr and the curious glint she had
caught in his eye at dinner the night before. It would be amusing, she
thought, if Bates instead of handing Simon the carving-knife should
sometime so far forget himself as to slip it between his master's
shoulders.

Amusing was the word she used to herself; perhaps, as the butler had
suggested, she had brought home some terrible ideas from the
East--ideas about Kismet and fatalism and the cheapness of human life
in comparison to human good. Wrong ideas, from the point of view of
the queer, drab, cramped and hypocritical Occidental mind.

She contemplated the Occidental mind briefly, then dismissed it as a
negligible quantity and settled to her book.

_VI: An Aunt in Need_

It was very nearly dinner-time before Copley Varr came back from his
talk with Sheila Graham. In deference to a hint from her that the
course of true love could not run smooth that afternoon in the vicinity
of her father, they had taken a long walk over the hills along quiet
country roads where hands could touch unseen by alien eyes. They were
happy, but rather nervously so, with something of the nervousness of a
young colt about to kick over the traces for the first time and who is
a little uncertain about the consequences.

One bit of their afternoon was devoted to a ramble around the grounds
of a small, vacant house, whose exterior they viewed and discussed from
every possible angle. It stood in the center of a wooded ten-acre
tract, a long mile by winding road from Simon Varr's house but not a
quarter of that distance from it as a plane flies. It was situated, in
fact, at the bottom of the very hill on which Simon's home flaunted its
greater magnificence, and it had once formed part of the property until
severed from it by the elder Copley's will.

They tried the front and back door, but finding them quite naturally
locked they made no further effort to effect an entrance. They
contented them