ess, to wreak on her something of the controlled emotion.
The fear that had come on the night of her arrival pressed closely on
Karen then, but, more closely still, the pain for Tante. Tante's clear
dignity was blurred; her image, in its rebuffed and ineffectual
autocracy, became hovering, uncertain, piteous. And, in seeing and
feeling all these things, as if with a lacerated sensitiveness, Karen
was aware that, in this last week of her life, she had grown much older.
She felt herself in some ways older than her guardian.

It was on the morning of her seventh day at Les Solitudes that she met
Mr. Drew walking early in the garden.

The sea was glittering blue and gold; the air was melancholy in its
sweetness; birds whistled.

Karen examined Mr. Drew as he approached her along the sunny upper
terrace.

With his dense, dark eyes, delicate face and golden hair, his white
clothes and loose black tie, she was able to recognize in him an object
that might charm and even subjugate. To Karen he seemed but one among
the many strange young men she had seen surrounding Tante; yet this
morning, clearly, and for the first time, she saw why he subjugated
Tante and why she resented her subjugation. There was more in him than
mere pose and peculiarity; he had some power; the power of the cat: he
was sincerely indifferent to anything that did not attract him. And at
the same time he was unimportant; insignificant in all but his
sincerity. He was not a great writer; Tante could never make a great
writer out of him. And he was, when all was said and done, but one among
many strange young men.

"Good morning," he said. He doffed his hat. He turned and walked beside
her. They were in full view of the house. "I hoped that I might find
you. Let us go up to the flagged garden," he suggested; "the sea is
glittering like a million scimitars. One has a better view up there."

"But it is not so warm," said Karen. "I am walking here to be in the
sun."

Mr. Drew had also been walking there to be in the sun; but they were in
full view of the house and he was aware of a hand at Madame von
Marwitz's window-curtain. He continued, however, to walk beside Karen up
and down the terrace.

"I think of you," he said, "as a person always in the sun. You suggest
glaciers and fields of snow and meadows full of flowers--the sun pouring
down on all of them. I always imagine Apollo as a Norse God. Are you
really a Norwegian?"

Karen was, as we have said,