herself in a tiny silver bucket filled with ice. It was a schoolgirl's dream of magnificence . . . something out of the pages of a super-romantic novelette. In the beginning, the spectacle, proceeding through course after course, dazzled Ellen and made her shy. It was superb food, for in the veins of Thérèse there blended the blood of Frenchman and Greek. It was food that had a taste . . . not the boiled stuff of Anglo-Saxons.
After dinner, when they had all gone into the dark library, the moment came at last when Ellen's tongue was loosed. It may have been the wine she drank or it may have been the cigarette which, in her new freedom, she smoked over the coffee (for in a single evening she had broken two of Clarence's rules); but it is more likely that it was the picture hanging over the mantelpiece, which changed everything.
She looked at it carefully and then said, "Is that by Turner? My aunt has one by him."
And a moment later, under the subtle urgence of Sabine, she was telling them everything. She described, for example, the Town, its Mills, its desolation, the misery of the workers. She painted for them a picture of her own family, of the Red Scot who lay now, helpless and childish, in her own big bed. She told them of her other grandfather, cold and aloof, who had run away in his youth and lived in the Paris of the Second Empire, and now existed in a room walled in by books. She recreated before their eyes the gloomy color of Shane's Castle, only to be interrupted in the midst by Thérèse Callendar, who turned to Sabine and observed, "She is a cousin, you know, of the Madame Shane we saw once at Madame de Cyon's in Paris. . . . You remember Madame de Cyon, the Russian woman, whose husband was French minister to Bulgaria. . . . She lived in the Avenue du Bois. A Bonapartist. Madame Shane was the beauty with red hair. . . . Miss Tolliver's Aunt Julia is her mother."
And then she permitted Ellen to continue, and the girl meanwhile, even as she talked, understood that Mrs. Callendar had not
