ual easily and with no personal
conjecture. She was so accustomed, no doubt, to the sudden appearance of
all sorts of people, that she had no discriminations to apply to his
case. There was no shyness and no surmise in her manner. She smiled at
him as composedly as she had smiled over the Great Wall of China in Mrs.
Forrester's drawing-room, and her pleasure in seeing him was neither
less frank nor more intimate.

She wore a broad hat of sun-burnt straw and a white serge coat and skirt
that looked as if they had shrunk in frequent washings. Her white blouse
had the little frills at neck and wrists and around her throat was the
gold locket on its black ribbon. Her eyes, when she turned them on him
and smiled, seemed to open distances like the limitlessness of the
moorland. Her tawny skin and shining golden hair were like the gorse and
primroses and she in her serenity and gladness like the day personified.

They did not attempt to talk through the loudly purring monotones of the
car, which picked its way swiftly and delicately down the turning road
and then skimmed lightly on the level ground between hedges of fuchsia
and veronica. As the prospect opened Karen pointed to the golden
shoulder of a headland bathed in sunlight and the horizon line of the
sea beyond. They turned among wind-bitten Cornish elms, leaning inland,
and Gregory saw among them the glimmer of Les Solitudes.

It was a white-walled house with a high-pitched roof of grey shingles,
delicately rippling; a house almost rustic, yet more nearly noble, very
beautiful; simple, yet unobtrusively adapted to luxury. Simplicity
reigned within, though one felt luxury there in a chrysalis condition,
folded exquisitely and elaborately away and waiting the return of the
enchantress.

Karen led him across the shining spaces of the hall and into the
morning-room. Books, flowers and sunlight seemed to furnish it, and,
with something austere and primitive, to make it the most fitting
background for herself. But while her presence perfected it for him, it
was her guardian's absence that preoccupied Karen. Again, and comically,
she reminded Gregory of the sacristan explaining to the sight-seer that
the famous altar-piece had been temporarily removed and that he could
not really judge the chapel without its culminating and consecrating
object. "If only Tante were here!" she said. "It seems so strange that
anyone should see Les Solitudes who has not seen her in it. I do not