He said: "You were bridesmaid to my mother. You are the Celia
Paige of her letters."
"She is always Connie Berkley to me. I loved no woman better. I
love her still."
"I found that out yesterday. That is why I dared come. I found,
among the English letters, one from you to her, written--after."
"I wrote her again and again. She never replied. Thank God, she
knew I loved her to the last."
He rested on the tabletop and stood leaning over and looking down.
"Dear Mr. Berkley," she murmured gently.
He straightened himself, passed a hesitating hand across his
forehead, ruffling the short curly hair. Then his preoccupied gaze
wandered. Ailsa turned toward him at the same moment, and
instantly a flicker of malice transformed the nobility of his set
features:
"It seems," he said, "that you and I are irrevocably related in all
kinds of delightful ways, Mrs. Paige. Your sister-in-law very
charmingly admits it, graciously overlooks and pardons my many
delinquencies, and has asked me to come again. Will you ask me,
too?"
Ailsa merely looked at him.
Mrs. Craig said, laughing: "I knew you were all Ormond and entirely
Irish as soon as I came in the do'--befo' I became aware of your
racial fluency. I speak fo' my husband and myse'f when I say,
please remember that our do' is ve'y wide open to our own kin--and
that you are of them----"
"Oh, I'm all sorts of things beside--" He paused for a
second--"Cousin Celia," he added so lightly that the grace with
which he said it covered the impudence, and she laughed in
semi-critical approval and turned to Ailsa, whose smile in response
was chilly--chillier still when Berkley did what few men have done
convincingly since powdered hair and knee-breeches became
unfashionable--bent to salute Celia Craig's fingertips. Then he
turned to her and took his leave of her in a conventional manner
entirely worthy of the name his mother bore,--and her mother before
her, and many a handsome man and many a beautiful woman back to
times when a great duke stood unjustly attainted, and the Ormonds
served their king with steel sword and golden ewer; and served him
faithfully and well.
Camilla Lent called a little later. Ailsa was in the backyard
garden, a trowel in her hand, industriously loosening the earth
around the prairie roses.
"Camilla," she said, looking up from where she was kneeling among
the shrubs, "what was it you said this morning about Mr. Berkley
being some unpleasant kind of man?"