After dinner Owen Leath wandered into the next room, where
the piano stood, and began to play among the shadows. His
step-mother presently joined him, and Darrow sat alone with
Madame de Chantelle.

She took up the thread of her mild chat and carried it on at
the same pace as her knitting. Her conversation resembled
the large loose-stranded web between her fingers: now and
then she dropped a stitch, and went on regardless of the gap
in the pattern.

Darrow listened with a lazy sense of well-being. In the
mental lull of the after-dinner hour, with harmonious
memories murmuring through his mind, and the soft tints and
shadowy spaces of the fine old room charming his eyes to
indolence, Madame de Chantelle's discourse seemed not out of
place. He could understand that, in the long run, the
atmosphere of Givre might be suffocating; but in his present
mood its very limitations had a grace.

Presently he found the chance to say a word in his own
behalf; and thereupon measured the advantage, never before
particularly apparent to him, of being related to the
Everards of Albany. Madame de Chantelle's conception of her
native country--to which she had not returned since her
twentieth year--reminded him of an ancient geographer's map
of the Hyperborean regions. It was all a foggy blank, from
which only one or two fixed outlines emerged; and one of
these belonged to the Everards of Albany.