she murmured.

He took her across the passage and into the dining-room. He wished to
show her an old china tea-set, quaintly embellished with noble palaces
and parks, that had been his great-grandmother's. There again she looked
but casually at the thing he accounted fit for her examination, and
carefully, if surreptitiously, at all the rest.

Last he showed her into the great square interior room with the glass
door on to the terrace over the court, the room which had been his
mother's and was now his own, and where hung a portrait of his mother.
On this Aurora fixed attentive and serious eyes, and had no need to
feign feeling, for appropriate feelings welled in her heart.

"How gentle she looks!" she said softly. "And how much you must miss
her!"

She stood for some time really trying to make acquaintance with the
vanished woman through that faded pastel likeness of her in youth which
Gerald kept where it had hung in her day, the portrait of herself which
she womanishly preferred because, as she did not conceal, it flattered
her.

"She looks like one of those people you would have just loved to lift
the burdens off and make everything smooth for," Aurora said; "and yet
she looks like one of those people who spend their whole lives trying to
make things smooth for others."

"Yes," said Gerald to that artless description of the feminine woman his
mother had been, and stood beside his guest, looking pensively up at the
portrait.

All at once, Aurora felt like crying. It had been increasing, the
oppression to her spirits, ever since she entered this house to which
she had come filled with gay anticipation and innocent curiosity. It had
struck her from the first moment as gloomy, and it was undoubtedly cold,
with its three sticks of wood ceremoniously smoking in the unaccustomed
chimney-place. Its esthetic bareness had affected her like the
meagerness of poverty. And now it seemed to her sad, horribly so,
haunted by the gentle ghosts of that mother and sister who had known and
touched all these things, sat in the chairs, looked through the windows,
and who conceivably came back in the twilight to flit over the
uncarpeted floor and peer in the dim mirrors to see how much the grave
had changed them. She shivered. Yes, cold and bare and sad seemed
Gerald's dwelling. And Gerald, whose very bearing was a dignified denial
that anything about himself or his circumstances could call for
compassion--Gerald, thin and withou