knew that he had divorced her mother--why, she could not say. She
liked her mother on many counts, though she could not feel that she
actually loved her--Mrs. Carter was too fatuous at times, and at other
times too restrained. This house at Pocono, or Forest Edge, as Mrs.
Carter had named it, was conducted after a peculiar fashion. From June
to October only it was open, Mrs. Carter, in the past, having returned
to Louisville at that time, while Berenice and Rolfe went back to their
respective schools. Rolfe was a cheerful, pleasant-mannered youth, well
bred, genial, and courteous, but not very brilliant intellectually.
Cowperwood's judgment of him the first time he saw him was that under
ordinary circumstances he would make a good confidential clerk,
possibly in a bank. Berenice, on the other hand, the child of the
first husband, was a creature of an exotic mind and an opalescent
heart. After his first contact with her in the reception-room of the
Brewster School Cowperwood was deeply conscious of the import of this
budding character. He was by now so familiar with types and kinds of
women that an exceptional type--quite like an exceptional horse to a
judge of horse-flesh--stood out in his mind with singular vividness.
Quite as in some great racing-stable an ambitious horseman might
imagine that he detected in some likely filly the signs and lineaments
of the future winner of a Derby, so in Berenice Fleming, in the quiet
precincts of the Brewster School, Cowperwood previsioned the central
figure of a Newport lawn fete or a London drawing-room. Why? She had
the air, the grace, the lineage, the blood--that was why; and on that
score she appealed to him intensely, quite as no other woman before had
ever done.

It was on the lawn of Forest Edge that Cowperwood now saw Berenice. The
latter had had the gardener set up a tall pole, to which was attached a
tennis-ball by a cord, and she and Rolfe were hard at work on a game of
tether-ball. Cowperwood, after a telegram to Mrs. Carter, had been met
at the station in Pocono by her and rapidly driven out to the house.
The green hills pleased him, the up-winding, yellow road, the
silver-gray cottage with the brown-shingle roof in the distance. It
was three in the afternoon, and bright for a sinking sun.

"There they are now," observed Mrs. Carter, cheerful and smiling, as
they came out from under a low ledge that skirted the road a little way
from the cottage. Berenice, e