"Love story, of course," returned Lensky, briefly. "When a woman looks like that it always is a love story."
"Yes, but—Théo is such a dear! And I know he writes to her."
"Then it isn't Théo. He's not the only man she knows."
Pam frowned thoughtfully. "That's true, but—she is so beautiful."
Lensky smiled at her, and on his strangely white, shrewd, worldly-wise face the smile looked like a sudden flash of sunlight. "Yes, she is without a doubt very beautiful, but——"
"'But'?"
"I think she is taking her trouble the wrong way. She is bearing it without grinning, and the grinning is to my mind the greater half."
"But remember what her surroundings at home are, Jack. She had had no discipline whatever; her mother is horrid——"
Lensky did not answer. Somehow he never cared to hold forth on the subject of mothers to his wife.
And then, thin, erect, light-footed, Pam went out from the house in which her strange childhood had been lived, and turning to her left passed down the dangerously mossy marble steps, and into the olive grove.