"I'm so dreadfully grieved to have broken this beautiful vase. I can't think how I came to drop it. Oh, I am so sorry."
"It doesn't matter the least bit," Geoff declared emphatically.
Evarne was now seated on the edge of the throne, and for a minute the four men stood in a semicircle, silently surveying her. She could have wrung her hands in agony under this scrutiny.
"Please don't bother about me any longer," she cried, and there were traces of rising excitement in her voice. "I am so sorry to have made such a stupid disturbance. Please, please leave me alone now. There's nothing the matter with me."
Geoff took her at her word.
"Come over here and look at the beginning of my new picture, Winborough," he suggested, after a final keen and anxious glance at Evarne.
While the scarcely-started canvas was being explained, and attention was thus entirely distracted from herself, Evarne brought all the force of her will to bear on gaining complete self-mastery. And for this she had need to call upon that emergency fund of strength, endurance and resolution that a woman's fine nervous system almost invariably produces when great necessity demands. Every moment the horror that assailed her appeared to grow more crushing, more unendurable, yet she sat there silent and motionless, with an unruffled brow and an expression of perfect calm upon her beautiful features.
She could not keep her fascinated gaze from the spectacle of the two cousins going the round of the room together, Geoff chatting gaily as he displayed the various little oddments and curiosities that he had brought from Italy. Finally he produced a portfolio of water-colour sketches and handed them to his cousin one by one, describing, explaining, pointing out various parts that were to be especially noticed. Morris nodded, questioned, admired, held them at arm's-length to be better judged, all apparently without another thought in his mind beyond Art and Venice.
As the two men stood thus side by side, Evarne could most distinctly see traces of the relationship between them—more in the demeanour, the general build and outline, than in feature—but kinship, clear and unmistakable. There was exactly the same carriage of the head, much the same walk, while their hands—slender, long-fingered and especially well-tended—were practically identical.
Morris had changed very little in the seven years that had been lived through since the stormy scene that had marked that final parting on that spring morning in Paris. His dark hair was thinner, perchance, and turning grey upon the temples; there were a few more of Time's scratches upon his brow. But although he must be now somewhere about fifty-five, his figure—thanks probably to his devotion to fencing—was still as slender, as trim and upright as that of any of the younger men in the room.