and threw herself and her
youthful unhappiness straight at the man who had not yet destroyed the
picture that Nina found when she visited her brother's rooms with the
desire to be good to him with rocking-chairs!

Not that she really believed or feared that Philip would consider such
an impossible reconciliation; pride, and a sense of the absurd, must
always check any such weird caprice of her brother's conscience; and
yet--and yet other amazing and mismated couples had done it--had been
reunited.

And Nina was mightily troubled, for Alixe's capacity for mischief was
boundless; and that she, in some manner, had already succeeded in
stirring up Philip, was a rumour that persisted and would not be
annihilated.

To inform a man frankly that a young girl is a little in love with him
is one of the oldest, simplest, and easiest methods of interesting that
man--unless he happen to be in love with somebody else. And Nina had
taken her chances that the picture of Alixe was already too unimportant
for the ceremony of incineration. Besides, what she had ventured to say
to him was her belief; the child appeared to be utterly absorbed in her
increasing intimacy with Selwyn. She talked of little else; her theme
was Selwyn--his influence on Gerald, and her delight in his
companionship. They had, at his suggestion, taken up together the study
of Cretan antiquities--a sort of tender pilgrimage for her, because,
with the aid of her father's and mother's letters, note-books, and
papers, she and Selwyn were following on the map the journeys and
discoveries of her father.

But this was not all; Nina's watchful eyes opened wider and wider as she
witnessed in Eileen the naissance of an unconscious and delicate
coquetry, quite unabashed, yet the more significant for that; and Nina,
intent on the new phenomena, began to divine more about Eileen in a
single second, than the girl could have suspected of herself in a month
of introspection and of prayer.

Love was not there; Nina understood that; but its germ was--still
dormant, but bedded deliciously in congenial soil--the living germ in
all its latent promise, ready to swell with the first sudden heart-beat,
quicken with the first quickening of the pulse, unfold into perfect
symmetry if ever the warm, even current in the veins grew swift and hot
under the first scorching whisper of Truth.

* * * * *

Eileen, sewing by the nursery window, looked up; her li