Was she going to go down in a storm of weeping? She felt it raging toward her, a storm of terrible weeping. It did not threaten from her heart or from herself at all,—from the outside somehow, an impersonal, objective storm racing toward her. She clutched her fingers into her palms. She had never cried before anybody in her life. And now of all times to choose for such a performance! If Hugh would only look at her! Only steady her! But he did not look up from his cigarette case. He was feeling its cold silver surfaces. There was no help from him. At her back Mr. Enderly was laughing. Anne had made him laugh by something she had been murmuring. They had not heard anything of what Ariel had said. And then Ariel heard a book close sharply. So Glenn was listening. He was not reading. She turned to him and went on. She did not know how but his shutting the book had shut out the storm of weeping. Like a door closed against a whirlwind. “So my mother gave me to Father. As soon as she was able to go back to her work again, she gave me right to him. I was five weeks old. I was all his, every bit his. Not hers any more. I was as easy as a kitten to take care of, so tiny, so healthy. I could fit into such small places, almost into his pocket. He took me to Bermuda. He’d always wanted to paint. And there, in Bermuda, he began to paint with all his soul. But the way he supported us was by writing Western stories for Western magazines. He’d already sold a few while he was still teaching. But in Bermuda he had much more time. The stories didn’t bring much money. But we didn’t mind. There was nothing we really wanted that we didn’t have.—Even Paris.” Ariel was looking at Hugh now. He would understand about Paris. But he was regarding her gravely and did not seem able to smile his understanding of Paris. “But one has relatives. Aunts? Uncles? Grandmothers? You and your father,—you weren’t cut quite adrift from your family, were you?” Mrs. Weyman asked with sympathy. “Mother and Father were the end of their families. There were no relatives to be cut adrift from.” Mrs. Weyman asked one more question. The expression of her face and voice robbed it of impertinence. “And the paintings? Didn’t that, in time, take the place of the stories for magazines? Didn’t they pay your father?”