Her faded smile held a faint surprise.
“How did you know?”
“I am a clairvoyant, and did you sing, ‘Then You’ll Remember Me?’”
“No, I never sang; but Mary—your mother—did.”
They reached the back porch and passed through the wide hall into the shaded spaciousness of the drawing-room. In that quiet interior light that rested softly upon the decorous portraits of his forebears, the mahogany, and the accumulated bric-à-brac of three generations, he became aware of the incongruous presence of Stella. He realized again her clean-cut, finished daintiness, the incisiveness of voice and feature. As he released her hand, still aware of its hard, boyish grip, he heard his aunt’s voice, light, wandering, non-arresting, as if continuing some conversational thread, “And Miss Allison Clyde, Mark—my old friend.” He had been vaguely aware of some one else in the room, but when he met the smile of the older woman who held out her hand to him, he wondered that he had not realized it more promptly; for Miss Allison Clyde, although far removed from the youth of years, had about her something immediately and quietly charming—something, it occurred to him, that suggested autumnal perfumes and the warmth of late sunlight. It was a face with a certain fine austerity belonging to a generation at once more natural and more reserved than ours.
“So this is Mary’s boy,” she said. “You have her eyes.” He looked at her and unconsciously glanced at Stella. The older woman belonged to the quiet old room. Stella, despite the same inheritance, did not.
Tea was brought in by a maid grown gray in his aunt’s service, and Miss Lucretia presided. Mark’s eyes again wandered from Miss Allison Clyde to Stella with involuntary comparison.
No one would have accused Stella of not being a well-bred young woman, yet she sat, Mark noted, carelessly and not quite gracefully. Miss Allison Clyde was taller than Stella, yet she was adjusted to her chair with a disciplined grace and dignity far removed from stiffness.
“Stella has promised to sing ‘Crabbéd Age’ for me again,” she announced when tea was finished.
“Shall I sing it now?” Stella rose with her promptness, and, going to the piano, plunged at once into the opening bars. Although the composer was not an egoist, he shuddered.