"We Paiges and Berkleys are kin to the Ormonds and the Earls of Ossory. The Estcourts, the Paiges, the Craigs, the Lents, the Berkleys, intermarried a hundred years ago. . . . My grandmother knew yours, but the North is very strange in such matters. . . . Why did you never before come?" He said: "It's one of those things a man is always expecting to do, and is always astonished that he hasn't done. Am I unpardonable?" "I did not mean it in that way." He turned his dark, comely head and looked at her as they bent together above the album. "I know you didn't. My answer was not frank. The reason I never came to you before was that--I did not know I would be welcomed." Their voices dropped. Ailsa standing by the window, watching the orioles in the maple, could no longer distinguish what they were saying. He said: "You were bridesmaid to my mother. You are the Celia Paige of her letters." "She is always Connie Berkley to me. I loved no woman better. I love her still." "I found that out yesterday. That is why I dared come. I found, among the English letters, one from you to her, written--_after_." "I wrote her again and again. She never replied. Thank God, she knew I loved her to the last." He rested on the tabletop and stood leaning over and looking down. "Dear Mr. Berkley," she murmured gently. He straightened himself, passed a hesitating hand across his forehead, ruffling the short curly hair. Then his preoccupied gaze wandered. Ailsa turned toward him at the same moment, and instantly a flicker of malice transformed the nobility of his set features: "It seems," he said, "that you and I are irrevocably related in all kinds of delightful ways, Mrs. Paige. Your sister-in-law very charmingly admits it, graciously overlooks and pardons my many delinquencies, and has asked me to come again. Will you ask me, too?" Ailsa merely looked at him. Mrs. Craig said, laughing: "I knew you were all Ormond and entirely Irish as soon as I came in the do'--befo' I became aware of your racial fluency. I speak fo' my husband and myse'f when I say, please remember that our do' is ve'y wide open to our own kin--and that you are of them----" "Oh, I'm all sorts of things beside--" He paused for a second--"Cousin Celia," he added so lightly that the grace with which he said it covered the impudence, and she laughed in semi-critical approval and turned to Ailsa, whose smile in response was chilly--chillier still when Berkley did what few men have done convincingly since powdered hair and knee-breeches became unfashionable--bent to salute Celia Craig's fingertips. Then he turned to her and took his leave of her in a conventional manner entirely worthy of the name his mother bore,--and her mother before her, and many a handsome man and many a beautiful woman back to times when a great duke stood unjustly attainted, and the Ormonds served their king with steel sword and golden ewer; and served him faithfully and well.