"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."

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"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.




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