directed more particularly to her. While she listened to him, her face
glowed and her eyes shone with a light that every man could not bring
into them.

As Maurice and his wife followed him with their gaze, the same thought
was in their minds, and it had not just come to them, Why could not
Francis marry Claire Lessing and settle in America, instead of going
back ever and again to that life in the Latin Quarter? They did not
believe that it was a bad life or a dissipated one, but from the little
that they had seen of it when they were in Paris, it was at least a bit
too free and unconventional for their traditions. There were, too,
temptations which must assail any man of Francis's looks and talents.
They had perfect faith in the strength of his manhood, of course; but
could they have had their way, it would have been their will to hedge
him about so that no breath of evil invitation could have come nigh to
him.

But this younger brother, this half ward of theirs, was an unruly
member. He talked and laughed, rode and walked, with Claire Lessing with
the same free abandon, the same show of uninterested good comradeship,
that he had used towards her when they were boy and girl together. There
was not a shade more of warmth or self-consciousness in his manner
towards her than there had been fifteen years before. In fact, there was
less, for there had been a time, when he was six and Claire three, that
Francis, with a boldness that the lover of maturer years tries vainly to
attain, had announced to Claire that he was going to marry her. But he
had never renewed this declaration when it came time that it would carry
weight with it.

They made a fine picture as they sat together to-night. One seeing them