Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/287



RS. MANSTEY'S big country-house was temporarily empty of the guests she had gathered for a week-end in June when the two Eversley girls reached it, Saturday at noon. Their hostess met them at the door when the carriage wheels crunched on the gravelled curve of the drive before the house—a charming gray-haired woman of sixty, with a youthful face and a delicate girlish color.

"I've sent everybody away to explore—to ravage the country," she gayly explained the emptiness of the large hall, where the grouped chairs seemed recently vacated and pleasantly suggestive of suspended tête-à-tête. "I've had Rose before," Mrs. Manstey pursued, taking them up the stairs to their rooms, "but not you!" She gave Edith's shoulder an affectionate little pat. She thought the younger girl extremely beautiful—which she was, with a vivid, piquant face and charming eyes.

"I've had my day," Rose Eversley acknowledged, with her usual air of jesting gravity, that, almost ironic, made one always a little unsure of her. "Dear Mrs. Manstey, you perfectly see—don't you?—that Edith is papa's image, and—"

And he was my old sweetheart!" Mrs. Manstey completed, with humorous appreciation of her own repetition of an old story.

"Was he, really?" Edith wondered. "Mamma says you were her friend."

Mrs. Manstey laughed. "Couldn't I have been—both?" she gayly put it. "Friends are better than sweethearts—they last longer. Though of course you won't agree, at your age, to such heresy."

"Sweethearts?" the girl pondered as she lifted her hands to take off her hat. "I—don't know. It's such a pretty word, but it doesn't mean much these days—there aren't any!" She shrugged her shoulders with a petulant pessimism her youth made amusing. "Papa was the last of the kind—he's a love!—and you let mamma have him!"

"I didn't 'let. Mrs. Manstey enjoyed it. "When he met your mother he forgot all about me. Think of it! I haven't seen either him or your mother in years, years, years!"

"My years!" Edith said. "I was a baby, mamma says, when she saw you last."

"So you were."

A servant knocked, with a note for Mrs. Manstey. As she took it and turned to leave the room, her smile, caressingly including Rose, went past her and lingered a thought longer—as people's smiles had a way of doing—with Edith.

"I know you're tired," she added to her smile. "Five hours of train—Get into something cool and rest. Luncheon isn't until two."

She disappeared, and Rose looked at her sister, who, with her hat in her hand, was going into her room.

"Well—?" Rose lifted her voice in its faint drawl of interrogation.

Edith looked at her absently. "I don't know," she said, drawing her straight brows into a puzzled frown. "I'm as far away as ever—I'm so perplexed."

"Well—you'll have to decide, you know."

Edith shook her head impatiently and went into her room, closing the door. She hurried out of her dusty travelling things into cool freshness, and, settled in the most comfortable chair, gave herself up to an apparently endless fit of musing. She was so physically content that her mind refused to respond with any vigorous effort; to think at all was a crumpled rose-leaf.

From the lower hall the clock chimed one with musical vibrations. Edith leaned forward with her chin. on her hand, driving her thoughts into a definite path. The curtains stirred in a breeze