“From—from the South,” he answered.
“Oh,” she stared at him a moment longer with her cold, fixed smile. “Yes,” she said. “I can see you are. I thought so…. Well, children,” she said with an air of finality, “you can burn the candle at both ends if that’s what you want to do—go out and bay the moon if you like—but not too near the house,” she said good-naturedly. “Your mother’s going to bed…. Joel,” she said quietly, “you’ll be in to see me, of course, before you turn in.”
“Yes, Mums,” he whispered, eager, radiant, his tall, thin figure bent forward reverentially as he looked up at her, his eyebrows arching with their characteristic expression of fine surprise.—“But of course!” he said.
“Very well,” she said quietly. “And now good night to all of you.”
Turning, she went swiftly up the stairs, a tall, magnificently haughty figure of a woman, holding rustling and luxurious skirts.
“And now,” Joel whispered, when his mother had departed, “I’ll show you your room—and how to find the kitchen—and tell you anything you want to know—and after that,” he whispered, laughing and stroking his head, “you can do as you please, stay up as long as you like—but I’m going to bed.”
With these words he took his guest’s valise and started up the stairs. The young man followed him: he had been given a room on the second floor on the river side of the house. It was a magnificent spacious room so richly, softly carpeted that the foot sank down with velvety firmness to a noiseless tread. The quality of the room was the quality of the whole house—a kind of château-like grandeur and solidity, combined with the warmth, comfort and simplicity of a country house. Joel pressed buttons, flooding the great room with light. The wide and snowy covers of the great bed had been drawn back for the night. It was a bed fit for a king, and long and spacious enough for a man of seven feet: it waited there with a kind of still embrace, a silent and yet animate invitation that was eloquent with the promise of a strange and sweet repose.
Joel opened the door of the bathroom—it was a miracle of shining tile and creamy porcelain and gleaming silver and heavy, robe-like towels. Then Joel raised the shades, drew the curtains apart and opened the window: the fragrance of the night came in slowly, sustaining gauzy curtains on its breath of coolness like a cloud of gossamer. And
