"No, I do not think I do," she replied, frankly.
"Then I beg your pardon. Indeed, I am not worthy of lecturing any one upon that cold, hard word, duty," he said to himself rather than her. "I have not been a very dutiful son myself," a shadow crossing his dark features.
Beatrix again had no answer ready.
She went on quietly grouping her flowers into a large bunch. He watched the white hands with a lazy, æsthetic pleasure in their beauty as they gleamed among the crimson flowers of which she had gathered a larger quantity than of any other color.
He began to talk to her of the city where she lived, of the places she had visited, of people whom he supposed the Gordons would know. He was amazed at her ignorance on subjects where he would have supposed her to be at home.
"I have been to very few places, and I know very few people," she said, blushing. "I—I haven't been introduced into society yet. I am too young."
"Then where did she pick up that lover?" he asked himself. "She must have become infatuated with her dancing-master or her music-master."
But that evening when Mrs. Le Roy opened the piano and asked her to play, Beatrix begged to be excused. Being pressed, she declared that she had never learned the piano, she did not care for music—at least not very much.
No one expressed the surprise they felt. St. Leon played an aria for his mother, then they closed the piano.
"So it was not her music-master who won her heart. The circle narrows down to the professor of the terpsichorean art," he said to himself.