_This, Linda Condon's Gravest Bow._





LINDA CONDON




I


A black bang was, but not ultimately, the most notable feature of
her uncommon personality--straight and severe and dense across her
clear pale brow and eyes. Her eyes were the last thing to remember
and wonder about; in shade blue, they had a velvet richness, a
poignant intensity of lovely color, that surprised the heart. Aside
from that she was slim, perhaps ten years old, and graver than gay.

Her mother was gay for them both, and, therefore, for the entire
family. No father was in evidence; he was dead and never spoken of,
and Linda was the only child. Linda's dresses, those significant
trivialities, plainly showed two tendencies--the gaiety of her
mother and her own always formal gravity. If Linda appeared at dinner,
in the massive Renaissance materialism of the hotel dining-room, with
a preposterous magenta hair-ribbon on her shapely head, her mother
had succeeded in expressing her sense of the appropriately decorative;
while if Linda wore an unornamented but equally "unsuitable" frock of