d's best friend, even as Estelle was hers. She loved
Gerald for having just these people to meet them at tea, the ones he
himself thought most of. She felt sweetly flattered at being made one of
a company so choicely wise and good.

But the result was not exactly fortunate for the gaiety of the little
party, if Aurora's laugh had been counted upon to enliven it. Far from
shy though she was, she developed a disinclination to-day to speak. She
was impressed by the abbe, for whom her conversation did not seem to her
good enough.

The young priest, a convert to Catholicism, was Gerald's age, and had it
not been for his collar, the cut of his coat, would have looked like a
not at all unusual Englishman with blue eyes, curly black hair, a touch
of warm color in his shaven cheeks. Unless you sat across the tea-table
from him and now and then, while he quietly and unassumingly talked, met
his eyes.

Some persons said that he looked ascetic, some austere, some angelic.
Mrs. Foss, not finding the right adjective for his mixture of poise and
humanity, was content to call him charming. Gerald, who had known him
when they were Vin and Raldi to each other and equally far from entering
the Church, regarded him as simply the nicest fellow he knew. Aurora had
no definition for him, but did not feel disposed to ripple on as usual
in his hearing. Yet she would have liked to make friends with him, too.
She would have said to him some such thing as, "What are the thoughts
you have, which make you so calm, deep inside? But I know. We learned
them at our mother's knee, but in the fury of living, having fun,
getting on, we never revisit the chamber where they are kept. You live
in it."

He was talking with Estelle like any other man whose conversation should
not contain the faintest element of gallantry, and Estelle was talking
to him with an ease that Aurora marveled at. Aurora marveled how Estelle
could know, or seem to know, a lot of things which she had never before
given sign of caring about. If the two of them were not conversing upon
the symbolism of religious art! Having finished his tea, the abbe went
to fetch a book from Gerald's shelves, which he knew as well as his own,
and Estelle was shown reproductions of carvings on old cathedrals.

Mrs. Foss, who had been talking of the Carnival now beginning, telling
Aurora about corsi and coriandoli of the past as compared with the poor
remnants of these customs, and describing the stil