n
Marion's part, than an uneasy movement, but it betrayed its cause. Miss
Lucilla pressed her point with renewed insistence, and presently two big
tears hung on the long, black lashes and rolled down.

"I should like to see Mrs. Eveleth."

Like the hasty raising and dropping of a curtain on some jealously
guarded view, the words gave to Miss Lucilla but a fleeting glimpse of
what was passing in the obscure recesses of the girl's heart; but she
determined to make the most of it by fixing, there and then, the day and
hour when, without apparently forcing the event, the two might come face
to face on the neutral ground of Gramercy Park.

It was a meeting that, when it took place, would have been attended with
embarrassment had not both young women been practised in the ways of
their little world. Progress in mutual understanding was made the easier
by the existence, on both sides, of the European view of life, with its
fusion of interests, its softness of outline, its give and take of
toleration, in contradistinction to the sharp, clear, insistent American
demands for a certain line of conduct and no other. Five minutes had not
gone by in talk before each found in the other's presence that sense of
repose which comes from similar habits of thought and a common native
idiom. Whatever grounds for difference they might find, they were, at
least, ranged on the same side in that battle which the two hemispheres
half unconsciously wage upon each other as to the main purposes of life.
Thus they were able to approach their subject without that first
preliminary shock which makes it difficult for races to agree; and thus,
too, Marion Grimston found herself, before she was aware of it, pouring
out to Diane Eveleth that heart which, in response to Miss Lucilla's
tender pleading, had been dumb.

They sat in the big, sombre library where, only a few days before, Diane
had seen Derek Pruyn turn his back on her, without even a gesture of
farewell. On the long mahogany table the red azalea was in almost
passionate luxuriance of blossom; while through the open window faint
odors of lilac came from Miss Lucilla's bit of garden.

"I don't want you to think him worse than you're obliged to," Marion
said, as though in defence of the stand her heart had taken. "I've been
told that very few men possess the two kinds of courage--the moral and
the physical. Savonarola had the one and Nelson had the other; but
neither of them had both. And of