"Do you approve his coming--this way--without anybody inviting
him?" asked Ailsa uneasily.
"Of co'se, Honey-bell. He is a Berkley. He should have paid his
respects to us long ago."
"It was for him to mention the relationship when I met him. He did
not speak of it, Celia."
"No, it was fo' you to speak of it first," said Celia Craig gently.
"But you did not know that."
"Why?"
"There are reasons, Honey-bud."
"What reasons?"
"They are not yo' business, dear," said her sister-in-law quietly.
Ailsa had already risen to examine herself in the mirror. Now she
looked back over her shoulder and down into Celia's pretty
eyes--eyes as unspoiled as her own.
In Celia Craig remained that gracious and confident faith in
kinship which her Northern marriage had neither extinguished nor
chilled. The young man who waited below was a Berkley, a kinsman.
Name and quality were keys to her hospitality. There was also
another key which this man possessed, and it fitted a little locked
compartment in Celia Craig's heart. But Ailsa had no knowledge of
this. And now Mrs. Craig was considering the advisability of
telling her--not all, perhaps,--but something of how matters stood
between the House of Craig and the House of Berkley. But not how
matters stood with the House of Arran.
"Honey-bud," she said, "you must be ve'y polite to this young man."
"I expect to be. Only I don't quite understand why he came so
unceremoniously----"
"It would have been ruder to neglect us, little Puritan! I want to
see Connie Berkley's boy. I'm glad he came."
Celia Craig, once Celia Marye Ormond Paige, stood watching her
taller sister-in-law twisting up her hair and winding the thick
braid around the crown of her head a la coronal. Little wonder
that these two were so often mistaken for own sisters--the matron
not quite as tall as the young widow, but as slender, and fair, and
cast in the same girlish mould.
Both inherited from their Ormond ancestry slightly arched and
dainty noses and brows, delicate hands and feet, and the same
splendid dull-gold hair--features apparently characteristic of the
line, all the women of which had been toasts of a hundred years
ago, before Harry Lee hunted men and the Shadow of the Swamp Fox
flitted through the cypress to a great king's undoing.
Ailsa laid a pink bow against her hair and glanced at her
sister-in-law for approval.