Isabelle had been intensely curious but her questions had elicited no satisfaction from her brother, and Evadne had answered simply, “Louis took a fancy to put it on my finger:  I am wearing it to please him, that is all:”  and even Isabelle found her cousin’s sweet dignity an effectual bar against her morbid inquisitiveness.

They had seen comparatively little of each other.  Evadne was constantly busy, either at private or hospital nursing, and very short were the furloughs which she spent under her uncle’s roof.  Louis had spent the first winter after his illness with his mother in the South of France, now he was in Florida, but he wrote regularly, and Evadne answered—­when she could.  Sweet, pleading letters which he read over and over and honestly tried to be better:  but it was only for her sake; he knew no higher motive—­yet.

It was a perfect day.  Down by the river an alligator was sunning himself, and the resinous breath of the pine trees swept its aromatic fragrance over Louis as he lay at full length in a hammock with his hands behind his head.  He had thrown the magazine he had been reading on the ground and it lay open at the article on Heredity which he had just finished.  His desultory thoughts were roaming idly over the subject, when one, more far reaching than the rest, made him start lip with a sudden shock of unwelcome surprise.

“By Jove!  Can it be that I am a victim of it too?  It looks confoundedly like it, although even my sweet little Puritan has not felt it a sin against her conscience to keep me in the dark.”

He thrust his fingers with an impatient gesture through his hair.  “Now I come to think of it, the case grows deucedly clear.  The South of France one winter and Florida this!  Simple nervous prostration would seem to the uninitiated better fought in the exhilirating ozone of Colorado, or—­the North Pole—­than in this languorous atmosphere.  ’An inherited tendency.’  Is this the pleasant little legacy which my respected ancestor has bequeathed to his only grandson?  It skipped the Judge, but it caught poor Uncle Lenox, and now it has nabbed me!  What a fool I have been not to surmise what this confounded pain meant between my shoulders!  Grandfather Hildreth kept himself alive with nostrums until he was seventy, but he was an invalid all his life.  He ought to be cursed for his contemptible selfishness in bringing so much suffering upon the race!  There’s none of the taint about Evadne, bless her!  Russe told me the Hospital examiners said they had never passed such a perfect specimen of health.”

He stopped suddenly and bit his lips in pain.  Would he not follow his grandfather’s example—­if he had the chance?

“What in the world is the meaning of all this?”

Louis had arrived by an earlier train than he was expected and only his mother was at home to greet him.  The hall was in confusion, workmen’s tools lay about and ladders stood against the walls.  Mrs. Hildreth laughed lightly, as she laid her hand within her son’s arm.