slate-gray shot with tiny topaz colored flecks, eyes which as Sylvia said "looked" at women. They looked now, which was scarcely strange considering how beautiful Felicia Emory was at thirty-three.

"Will you have tea?" inquired Felicia.

"Thanks, no." He shook his head with a humorous gesture. "I've taken tea at the Oriole Inn--almost forcible feeding, in fact. It seems they are serving a new kind of sandwich to-day and Sylvia waylaid me and insisted on trying it on the dog so to speak. She and Suzanne and Barbara and Martha and Hope all stood by to watch the effect. I was never so nervous in my life. May I smoke to calm my spirit?"

Felicia nodded assent and sat down, resuming her sewing.

"I am glad to see you still survive," she said, as he lit his cigarette and dropped into a near-by chair.

"Oh, yes, I still survive. It was really an excellent sandwich in its way, though I should hate to have to pass an examination on its contents. It was one of Sylvia's inventions it seems. Tell me, does she have the whole Hill on her hands? First it's a garden party at 'Hester house,' Sylvia at the helm; then it is the Byrd sisters who have to be petted or scolded or braced, or a patient of Doctor Tom's who needs attention, or his babies that have to be story-told to, or Marianna and Donald who have to have her assistance in a dramatic performance of Lord Ullin's Daughter. I heard her shouting 'I'll forgive your Highland Chief' yesterday while the kids eloped in the hammock, amidst high billows, I judge from the way the boat was rocking. To-day it is the Oriole Inn sandwich. She is a most remarkable young person, this Sylvia of yours, with a most insatiable energy."

"She is, indeed," agreed Felicia heartily. "The Hill can hardly get along without Sylvia. We all mope and get selfish and lazy, what she calls 'rutty' when she is away from it. I am so glad she is home for keeps now. The Hill is never quite the same without her."

"But she won't stay on it forever," warned Stephen Kinnard. "She is a live wire--that young lady. She isn't going to be content to settle down on even so lovely a hill as hers. Also she is more than likely to get married."

"I suppose so," sighed Felicia.

"What a lugubrious tone to vouchsafe to the holy state!" he teased.

"It isn't the holy state in itself. It is Sylvia. I hate to have her get grown up and married and settled down. I'd like to keep things just as they are for awhile. The dread of changes seems to grow on me as I get old."

Felicia smiled as she made the statement but there was genuine feeling behind it.

"Would you dread change for yourself?"

"For myself? I don't know. I wasn't thinking especially about myself."

"Do you ever?"

"Not oftener than is agreeable. I am getting to be a very placid, settled sort of person. That is the comfort of being in the thirties. You don't expect so much of life. Now, ten years ago if I had been thinking of submitting designs for a competition I should have been frightfully excited. Now, I think I would almost rather not win, which is fortunate considering how little chance there is of my doing so."

"There is all the chance in the world," objected Stephen. "You need a little of the virus of vanity instilled into you. Felicia, do you remember back there in Paris when old Regnier used to insist you had more talent than any man in his class?"

Felicia tranquilly snipped off her thread and admitted that she remembered.

"And do you remember how he raved when you told him you were going to marry Syd?"

Felicia nodded. She remembered that, too; remembered also, though she did not say so, how she had smiled at the old master's ravings, sure that love would prove no hindrance to her art, sure that she and Sydney would work and achieve fame together. She had not dreaded changes in those days. She had welcomed them, taken risks blithely, unafraid. And there had been risks. Her aunt had raved also, to more purpose than the Master, and in a moment of rage had changed her will, cutting off from inheritance the willful girl who chose to reject the French count her judicious relative had selected for her and insisted on marrying instead a penniless artist. The loss of her inheritance had seemed to Felicia at the time a trifle light as air, quite as irrelevant indeed as the Master's gloomy prediction as to the eternal incompatibility of art and matrimony. All these things she had thrown into the scales with love in the opposite balance and love had weighed immeasurably heaviest.

There had followed a few years of idyllic happiness. Though with the coming of the babies the art she loved had been temporarily suspended; both she and her husband promised themselves eagerly that it was only a suspension, that she would go back to it again as soon as Marianna and Brother were just a little older. But before Marianna and Brother were much older Felicia was left alone with a "big heartache to carry round inside her and two children to provide immediate bread and butter for," as Suzanne had put it. And so the old dreams had been thrust out of sight, and the young woman whom the Master pronounced to have possessed more talent than twenty talented young men, fell to earning a living for herself and her little folk by painting place cards and Christmas greetings and calendars and such like small ilk. All this drifted in retrospect through Felicia Emory's mind as she bent over her sewing, and something in the droop of her mouth touched Stephen as he perceived it. Impulsively he threw away his cigarette and leaned forward letting his hand touch hers.

"Felicia, forgive me! I didn't mean to hurt you."

"You didn't. It just came back to me for a moment how fearfully young and happy and ignorant I was in those days. But with all the wisdom I've garnered since, if I had it to do over again, I suppose I should travel precisely the same road. Isn't it queer, Stephen? Don't you feel that way about the past, too?"

"No, my road was too devilish rough. I'd like it different."

Felicia looked up, surprised both at his words and the unusual passion in his voice.

"Do you suppose I have ever forgotten I didn't get what I wanted? Felicia, I loved you before Syd ever saw you."

"I know. I'm sorry. I was always sorry. You know that, Stephen."

"You needn't be. Loving you made a man of me, though it did make the road rough. Things had come my way rather too easily up to that time. Syd was the better man. I always owned that."

"You were fine, Stephen. I've never forgotten how fine. And Sydney cared more for you than for any one else in the world--barring us." She smiled a little and her eyes strayed out to the magnolia tree beneath whose generous shade Marianna and Donald were laboriously engaged in the construction of a kite with much chatter and argument.

"Felicia."

"Yes?"

"Are you so afraid of change you wouldn't risk beginning over again--with me?"

Felicia's sewing dropped in her lap and her blue eyes opened wide with surprise and consternation as she looked up to meet his dark, eager eyes.