Not her words, but her voice made her cousin stop his drawing. In it was a hint of the tears she hated to shed. Bella leant her elbow on the table, rested her head in her hand and searched Fairfax's face with her eloquent eyes. They were not like her mother's, doe-like and
patient; Bella's were dark eyes, superb and shadowy. They held something of the Spanish mystery, caught from the strain that ran through the Carew family from the Middle Ages, when the Carez were nobles in Andalusia.
"I am angry with myself, Bella; I am a fool."
"Oh no, you're not," she breathed devotedly, "you're a genius."
The tension of Fairfax's heart relaxed. The highest praise that any woman could have found, this child, in her naïveté, gave him.
"Why don't you make some figures and sell them, Cousin Antony? Are you worried about money troubles?" She had heard these terms often.
"Yes," he said shortly, "just that."
He had gone on to sketch a head on the drawing-board, touching it absently, and over his shoulder Bella murmured—
"Cousin Antony, it's just like me. You just draw wonderfully."
He deepened the shadows in the hair and rounded the ear, held it some way off and looked at it.