at the other's ruthlessness. "Three months of every year--almost."

"Three months when they played hostess to each other. It was really Valerie
who was the guest in the house when Imogen and her father were there. The
relation was never normal. Now that poor Everard is gone, the necessary
artificiality can cease. Valerie can try her hand at being a mother, not a
guest. It will do both her and Imogen good."

"That's just the conclusion I had come to. That's just how I had been
seeing it." The fresh tea-pot was brought in at this juncture, and, as she
spoke, Valerie roused herself to measure in the tea and pour on the boiling
water. She showed them, thus, more fully, the grace, the freshness, the
look of latent buoyancy that made her so young, that made her, even now, in
her black dress and with her gravity, remind one of a flower, submerged,
momentarily, in deep water, its color hardly blurred, its petals delicately
crisp, its fragrance only needing air and sunlight to diffuse itself. For
all the youthfulness, a quality of indolent magic was about her, a soft
haze, as it were, woven of matured experience, of detachment from youth's
self-absorption, of the observer's kindly, yet ironic, insight. Her figure
was supple; her nut-brown hair, splendidly folded at the back of her head,
was hardly touched with white; her quickly glancing, deliberately pausing,
eyes were as clear, as pensive, as a child's; with almost a child's candor
of surprise in the upturning of their lashes. A brunette duskiness in the
rose of lips and cheeks, in the black brows, in the fruit-like softness of
outline, was like a veil drawn across and dimming the fairness that paled
to a pearly white at throat and temples. Her upper lip was ever so faintly
shadowed with a brunette penciling of down, and three _grains de beaute_,
like tiny patches of velvet, seemed applied with a pretty coquetry, one on
her lip and two high on her cheek, where they emphasized and lent a touch
of the Japanese to her smile. Even her physical aspect carried out the