“I hadn’t the remotest idea of the affair.  I thought that we were trying to learn something about life and about each other. . . .  Then that climax came.”

He turned and stared out of the window, dropping his sister’s hand.  “She couldn’t stand me, she couldn’t stand the life, the climate, the inconveniences, the absence of what she was accustomed to.  She was dead tired of it all.  I can understand that.  And I—­I didn’t know what to do about it. . . .  So we drifted; and the catastrophe came very quickly.  Let me tell you something; a West Pointer, an Annapolis man, knows what sort of life he’s going into and what he is to expect when he marries.  Usually, too, he marries into the Army or Navy set; and the girl knows, too, what kind of a married life that means.

“But I didn’t.  Neither did Alixe.  And we went under; that’s all—­fighting each other heart and soul to the end. . . .  Is she happy with Ruthven?  I never knew him—­and never cared to.  I suppose they go about in town among the yellow set.  Do they?”

“Yes.  I’ve met Alixe once or twice.  She was perfectly composed—­formal but unembarrassed.  She has shifted her milieu somewhat—­it began with the influx of Ruthven’s friends from the ‘yellow’ section of the younger married set—­the Orchils, Fanes, Minsters, and Delmour-Carnes.  Which is all right if she’d stay there.  But in town you’re likely to encounter anybody where the somebodies of one set merge into the somebodies of another.  And we’re always looking over our fences, you know. . . .  By the way,” she added cheerfully, “I’m dipping into the younger set myself to-night—­on Eileen’s account.  I brought her out Thursday and I’m giving a dinner for her to-night.”

“Who’s Eileen?” he asked.

“Eileen?  Why, don’t you—­why, of course, you don’t know yet that I’ve taken Eileen for my own.  I didn’t want to write you; I wanted first to see how it would turn out; and when I saw that it was turning out perfectly, I thought it better to wait until you could return and hear all about it from me, because one can’t write that sort of thing—­”

“Nina!”

“What, dear?” she said, startled.

“Who the dickens is Eileen?”

“Philip!  You are precisely like Austin; you grow impatient of preliminary details when I’m doing my very best attempting to explain just as clearly as I can.  Now I will go on and say that Eileen is Molly Erroll’s daughter, and the courts appointed Austin and me guardians for her and for her brother Gerald.”

“Oh!”

“Now is it clear to you?”

“Yes,” he said, thinking of the tragedy which had left the child so utterly alone in the world, save for her brother and a distant kinship by marriage with the Gerards.

For a while he sat brooding, arms loosely folded, immersed once more in his own troubles.

“It seems a shame,” he said, “that a family like ours, whose name has always spelled decency, should find themselves entangled in the very things their race has always hated and managed to avoid.  And through me, too.”