Professor Pembroke and his wife, Allison Craig, met them at the station,
to convoy them to the comfortable quarters in the dignified stone house
near Magdalen College, which Craig had more than once described to
Georgiana.

Here the young American had her first taste of a manner of life which
enchanted her. From the moment that she set eyes on Jefferson Craig's
sister, the original of the photograph she had so often studied with a
constriction of the heart, not knowing whose it was, she was drawn to
her as she had never been drawn to any other woman.

Sitting with her in the pleasant, chintz-hung living-room, walking with
her in the garden which was like no garden she had ever imagined, she
was conscious of a stronger sense of wonder than ever that a man whose
family was represented by a sister like this could ever have chosen the
crude young person she still considered herself. From Mrs. Pembroke,
however, she received only heart-warming assurance of her welcome and
her fitness.

"My dear," Allison said, as the two stood at an ivy-framed window one
morning, looking out at Mr. Warne and his son-in-law as they slowly
paced up and down beneath a row of copper beeches between house and
garden, "I never saw my brother so happy in his life. Jeff always was
hard to please as a boy. I used to think it was merely a critical
disposition, but later I discovered that it was his extreme distaste for
all artifice, acting, intrigue--all absence of genuineness. Only those
boys and men interested him whom he had absolute faith in.

"I don't mean that he himself was a goody-goody--far from it; he was a
terrible prank maker, and more than once narrowly missed suffering
serious consequences. But when he really grew up and it came to an
acquaintance with women, very few have even attracted him. I began to
fear that he was becoming hardened and would never find just what his
fastidious taste could approve--not to mention what his heart might
soften to. But now--well, I think I am almost as happy as he is, that he
has found you. He seems like a different being to me, and evidently it
is you who have wrought the miracle."

"I surely have made no change in him," Georgiana protested. "He has been
just as he is now from the beginning--except, of course, that I know him
better. I can't imagine him hardened to anything."

Allison Pembroke looked at her, smiling. She was herself an unusually
beautiful woman, more mature than Georgiana, but s