To inform a man frankly that a young girl is a little in love with him is one of the oldest, simplest, and easiest methods of interesting that man—­unless he happen to be in love with somebody else.  And Nina had taken her chances that the picture of Alixe was already too unimportant for the ceremony of incineration.  Besides, what she had ventured to say to him was her belief; the child appeared to be utterly absorbed in her increasing intimacy with Selwyn.  She talked of little else; her theme was Selwyn—­his influence on Gerald, and her delight in his companionship.  They had, at his suggestion, taken up together the study of Cretan antiquities—­a sort of tender pilgrimage for her, because, with the aid of her father’s and mother’s letters, note-books, and papers, she and Selwyn were following on the map the journeys and discoveries of her father.

But this was not all; Nina’s watchful eyes opened wider and wider as she witnessed in Eileen the naissance of an unconscious and delicate coquetry, quite unabashed, yet the more significant for that; and Nina, intent on the new phenomena, began to divine more about Eileen in a single second, than the girl could have suspected of herself in a month of introspection and of prayer.

Love was not there; Nina understood that; but its germ was—­still dormant, but bedded deliciously in congenial soil—­the living germ in all its latent promise, ready to swell with the first sudden heart-beat, quicken with the first quickening of the pulse, unfold into perfect symmetry if ever the warm, even current in the veins grew swift and hot under the first scorching whisper of Truth.

* * * * *

Eileen, sewing by the nursery window, looked up; her little Alsatian maid, cross-legged on the floor at her feet, sewing away diligently, also looked up, then scrambled to her feet as Selwyn halted on the threshold of the room.

“Why, how odd you look!” said Eileen, laughing:  “come in, please; Susanne and I are only mending some of my summer things.  Were you in search of the children?—­don’t say so if you were, because I’m quite happy in believing that you knew I was here.  Did you?”

“Where are the children?” he asked.

“In the Park, my very rude friend.  You will find them on the Mall if you start at once.”

He hesitated, but finally seated himself, omitting the little formal hand-shake with which they always met, even after an hour’s separation.  Of course she noticed this, and, bending low above her sewing, wondered why.

It seemed to him, for a moment, as though he were looking at a woman he had heard about and had just met for the first time.  His observation of her now was leisurely, calm, and thorough—­not so calm, however, when, impatient of his reticence, bending there over her work, she raised her dark-blue eyes to his, her head remaining lowered.  The sweet, silent inspection lasted but a moment, then she resumed her stitches, aware that something in him had changed since she last had seen him; but she merely smiled quietly to herself, confident of his unaltered devotion in spite of the strangely hard and unresponsive gaze that had uneasily evaded hers.