Page:Her Roman Lover (Frothingham, 1911).djvu/25

 dered at, since he probably did not understand them. Ah!”

The room became visible suddenly as the speaker entered it and touched an electric button near the door. But the light was reticent: it left shadows and the dignity of things not wholly revealed. It also showed touches of modern life, small low tables holding glass bowls of flowers, a book or two carelessly left as though from recent reading, and a silver tea-set evidently prepared for immediate use.

The woman who had just entered was a large and energetic creature, whose strongly moulded and handsome features expressed decision and independence. Perfect health of both body and mind was her great charm, and it could be felt by the sensitive observer that her character was broad, positive, benign like the daylight, and, like the daylight, without dimness or mystery.

She was not many years older than her niece, whose face seemed not yet to have emerged wholly from the recently banished twilight. The girl’s features were moulded with a certain tenderness, as though by a hand that made her for response to life rather than endurance of it. It was evident that she would suffer quickly, and with an intensity possible only to those in whom nerves and imagin