She answered him in an even, passionless voice: 

“A moment ago I was uncertain; now I know you.  You are what they say you are.  I never wish to see you again.”

Celia Craig came back with the album.  Berkley sprang to relieve her of the big book and a box full of silhouettes, miniatures, and daguerreotypes.  They placed the family depository upon the table and then bent over it together.

Ailsa remained standing by the window, looking steadily at nothing, a burning sensation in both cheeks.

At intervals, through the intensity of her silence, she heard Celia’s fresh, sweet laughter, and Berkley’s humorous and engaging voice.  She glanced sideways at the back of his dark curly head where it bent beside Celia’s over the album.  What an insolently reckless head it was!  She thought that she had never before seen the back of any man’s head so significant of character—­or the want of it.  And the same quality—­or the lack of it—­now seemed to her to pervade his supple body, his well-set shoulders, his voice, every movement, every feature—­something everywhere about him that warned and troubled.

[Illustration:  “What an insolently reckless head it was!”]

Suddenly the blood burnt her cheeks with a perfectly incomprehensible desire to see his face again.  She heard her sister-in-law saying: 

“We Paiges and Berkleys are kin to the Ormonds and the Earls of Ossory.  The Estcourts, the Paiges, the Craigs, the Lents, the Berkleys, intermarried a hundred years ago. . . .  My grandmother knew yours, but the North is very strange in such matters. . . .  Why did you never before come?”

He said:  “It’s one of those things a man is always expecting to do, and is always astonished that he hasn’t done.  Am I unpardonable?”

“I did not mean it in that way.”

He turned his dark, comely head and looked at her as they bent together above the album.

“I know you didn’t.  My answer was not frank.  The reason I never came to you before was that—­I did not know I would be welcomed.”

Their voices dropped.  Ailsa standing by the window, watching the orioles in the maple, could no longer distinguish what they were saying.

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: