"He must be nearly forty to have been one of Mother's suitors. But he looks hardly over thirty."
She heard him sigh as he drew his spirit back from far distances, and was sensitive to the power of control implied in the composed countenance which he turned to her.
"You should be Constance Fentriss."
"Constance Browning," she corrected. "I'm an old married woman of two years' standing."
"Grand Dieu!" he muttered. "I think of you always as hardly more than a child. As I used to hear about you. One loses touch."
"You had not seen my mother for a long time, had you?"
"Very long. Many years. But one does not forget her kind."
Constance, who had not seated herself during this passage of speech, crossed to the mantel, and lifted from it a heavily framed photograph which she placed in the visitor's hands.
"That was taken a few months before she died."