"My mother?" faltered Constance.
He gazed on her keenly, incredulously. "Your mother? That's hardly possible. Yet—yes. You are wonderfully like her." There was a caressing intonation in his voice as he said the words. "Permit me; I am Cary Scott."
"Oh!" gasped Constance in dismay. Cary Scott, the old romance about which she had heard her father joke her mother more than once, concerning which all the children had felt a lively curiosity because it was supposed to be "different" from Mona's other little adventures; Cary Scott here in the flesh and in tragic ignorance of her mother's death! Commanding herself, she drew aside with a slight, gracious gesture which bade him enter. Bowing, he passed into the hallway and shook the snow from his coat. Not until he had reached the door of the library did she gather her forces to tell him.
"Hadn't you heard about Mother, Mr. Scott?" she asked very gently.
Her tone stopped him. His eyes were steady as he raised them to the lovely, pitying face before him. But hollows seemed suddenly to have fallen in beneath them. "Not—?" he whispered.
She inclined her head. "Nearly a year ago."
"Why haven't I heard? Why was I not told?" he demanded.
"Father wrote you, I think. You must sit down." She pushed a chair around for him and, laying light hands upon his shoulders, slipped his coat back. "Take it off," she said.
He obeyed. He was like a man tranced. Seated under the lamplight he stared fixedly into a dark corner of the room, as if to evoke a vision for his appeasement. Sharply intrigued, Constance took the opportunity of observing him at her leisure. He was, she decided, a delightful personality, all the more engaging for that touch of the exotic, that hint of potential romance which the men of her acquaintance did not have. No woman would have called him handsome. His features were too irregular, and the finely modelled forehead was scarred vertically with a savagely deep V which mercifully lost itself in the clustering hair, a testimony to active war service. There was confident distinction in his bearing, and an atmosphere of quiet and somewhat ironic worldliness in voice and manner. He looked to be a man who had experimented much with life in its larger meanings and found it amusing but perhaps not fulfilling. Reckoning him contemporaneously with the implication of that betraying "Mona!" of his first utterance, Constance thought: