“He wasn’t always a woman-hater,” answered Cara slowly. Her pansy-dark eyes held a curious dreaming look.
“I’d forgotten. Of course, you’d met him before you came here. Did you know him pretty well?”
“It was so many years ago,” deprecated Cara, with a little wave of her hand which seemed to set her former friendship with Eliot away in the back ages. “But I knew a good deal about him—we knew his people when I was a girl in my teens—and I can understand why—how he became such a misanthrope.”
Ann made no answer. Somehow she felt she could not put any direct questions about this man whose changing, oddly contradictory moods had baffled her so completely and—although she would not have acknowledged it—had caught and held her imagination with equal completeness. Perhaps she was hardly actually aware how much the queer, abrupt owner of Heronsmere occupied her thoughts. Mrs. Hilyard, however, continued speaking without waiting to be questioned.
“Eliot Coventry has had just the sort of experience to make him cynical,” she went on in her pretty, dragging voice. “Particularly as regards women. His mother was a perfectly beautiful woman, with the temper of a fiend. She lived simply and solely for her own enjoyment, and never cared tuppence about either Eliot or his sister.”
“Oh, has he a sister?” The question sprang from Ann’s lips without her own volition.
“Yes. She was a very pretty girl, too, I remember.”
Ann’s thoughts flew back to the day of the Fête des Narcisses, recalling the pretty woman whom she had observed driving with Eliot in the prize car. Probably, since he so disliked women in general, his companion on that occasion had been merely his sister! She felt oddly pleased and contented at this solution of a matter which had nagged her curiosity more than a little at the time.
“Mrs. Coventry—the mother—was utterly selfish, and insisted upon her own way in everything.” Cara was pursuing her recollections in a quiet, retrospective fashion which gave Ann the impression that they had no very deep or poignant interest for her. “If she didn’t get it—well, there were fireworks!”—smiling. “Once, I remember, Eliot crossed her wishes over something and she flew into a perfect frenzy of temper. There was a small Italian dagger lying on a table near, and she snatched it up and flung it straight at him. It struck him just below one of his eyes; that’s how he came by that scar on his cheekbone. She might have blinded him,” she added, and for a moment there was a faint tremor in her voice.
“What a brute she must have been!” exclaimed Ann in horror.