"You can't turn 'em off of course," he said. "But you can have a dozen women to adjust the balance if you want 'em."
Avery did not, but she was too tired to argue the point. She let the subject slide.
They dined together in the oak-panelled dining-room where Piers had so often sat with his grandfather. The table seemed to stretch away inimitably into shadows, and Avery felt like a Lilliputian. From the wall directly facing her the last Lady Evesham smiled upon her—her baffling, mirthless smile that seemed to cover naught but heartache. She found herself looking up again and again to meet those eyes of mocking comprehension; and the memory of what Lennox Tudor had once told her recurred to her. This was Piers' Italian grandmother whose patrician beauty had descended to him through her scapegrace son.
"Are you looking at that woman with the smile?" said Piers abruptly.
She turned to him. "You are so like her, Piers. But I wouldn't like you to have a smile like that. There is something tragic behind it."
"We are a tragic family," said Piers sombrely. "As for her, she ruined her own life and my grandfather's too. She might have been happy enough with him if she had tried."
"Oh, Piers, I wonder!" Avery said, with a feeling that that smile revealed more to her than to him.
"I say she might," Piers reiterated, with a touch of impatience. "He thought the world of her, just as—just as—" he smiled at her suddenly—"I do of you. He never knew that she wasn't satisfied until one fine day she left him. She married again—afterwards, and then died. He never got over it."
But still Avery had a vagrant feeling of pity for the woman who had been Sir Beverley's bride. "I expect they never really understood each other," she said.
Piers' dark eyes gleamed. "Do you know what I would have done if I had been in his place?" he said. "I would have gone after her and brought her back—even if I'd killed her afterwards."