“I did not ask him,” she said.  “We scarcely exchanged a dozen words.  He merely said he’d like to call—­on you—­and now he’s done it, Celia!”

Mrs. Craig calmly instructed the servant to say that they were at home, and the servant withdrew.

“Do you approve his coming—­this way—­without anybody inviting him?” asked Ailsa uneasily.

“Of co’se, Honey-bell.  He is a Berkley.  He should have paid his respects to us long ago.”

“It was for him to mention the relationship when I met him.  He did not speak of it, Celia.”

“No, it was fo’ you to speak of it first,” said Celia Craig gently.  “But you did not know that.”

“Why?”

“There are reasons, Honey-bud.”

“What reasons?”

“They are not yo’ business, dear,” said her sister-in-law quietly.

Ailsa had already risen to examine herself in the mirror.  Now she looked back over her shoulder and down into Celia’s pretty eyes—­eyes as unspoiled as her own.

In Celia Craig remained that gracious and confident faith in kinship which her Northern marriage had neither extinguished nor chilled.  The young man who waited below was a Berkley, a kinsman.  Name and quality were keys to her hospitality.  There was also another key which this man possessed, and it fitted a little locked compartment in Celia Craig’s heart.  But Ailsa had no knowledge of this.  And now Mrs. Craig was considering the advisability of telling her—­not all, perhaps,—­but something of how matters stood between the House of Craig and the House of Berkley.  But not how matters stood with the House of Arran.

“Honey-bud,” she said, “you must be ve’y polite to this young man.”

“I expect to be.  Only I don’t quite understand why he came so unceremoniously——­”

“It would have been ruder to neglect us, little Puritan!  I want to see Connie Berkley’s boy.  I’m glad he came.”

Celia Craig, once Celia Marye Ormond Paige, stood watching her taller sister-in-law twisting up her hair and winding the thick braid around the crown of her head a la coronal.  Little wonder that these two were so often mistaken for own sisters—­the matron not quite as tall as the young widow, but as slender, and fair, and cast in the same girlish mould.

Both inherited from their Ormond ancestry slightly arched and dainty noses and brows, delicate hands and feet, and the same splendid dull-gold hair—­features apparently characteristic of the line, all the women of which had been toasts of a hundred years ago, before Harry Lee hunted men and the Shadow of the Swamp Fox flitted through the cypress to a great king’s undoing.

Ailsa laid a pink bow against her hair and glanced at her sister-in-law for approval.

“I declare.  Honey-bud, you are all rose colour to-day,” said Celia Craig, smiling; and, on impulse, unpinned the pink-and-white cameo from her own throat and fastened it to Ailsa’s breast.