"Oh, I'm so glad I can't tell you to see the place where you live!" she expanded. They went down the long corridor, past a closed door which he disappointingly did not open. "It's a dark room we use to store things," he explained. Neither did he open the door at the end of the hall. "It's Vincent's room," he said. They turned into the darker, narrower corridor, bent again, and went toward the little window high over somebody else's garden. He ushered Mrs. Hawthorne into the kitchen, for here, near the ceiling, was the door-bell, and on it the well-known coat of arms, crown and cannon-balls, which testified to the age and aristocracy of the house. While he sought to interest her in this curiosity, Aurora was looking at everything besides; for Giovanna was making preparations for dinner, and Aurora's thoughts were busy with the fowl she saw run on a long spit and waiting to be roasted before a bundle of sticks at the back of the sort of masonry counter that served as kitchen stove. "They do have the queerest ways of doing things!" she murmured. He took her across the passage and into the dining-room. He wished to show her an old china tea-set, quaintly embellished with noble palaces and parks, that had been his great-grandmother's. There again she looked but casually at the thing he accounted fit for her examination, and carefully, if surreptitiously, at all the rest. Last he showed her into the great square interior room with the glass door on to the terrace over the court, the room which had been his mother's and was now his own, and where hung a portrait of his mother. On this Aurora fixed attentive and serious eyes, and had no need to feign feeling, for appropriate feelings welled in her heart. "How gentle she looks!" she said softly. "And how much you must miss her!" She stood for some time really trying to make acquaintance with the vanished woman through that faded pastel likeness of her in youth which Gerald kept where it had hung in her day, the portrait of herself which she womanishly preferred because, as she did not conceal, it flattered her. "She looks like one of those people you would have just loved to lift the burdens off and make everything smooth for," Aurora said; "and yet she looks like one of those people who spend their whole lives trying to make things smooth for others." "Yes," said Gerald to that artless description of the feminine woman his mother had been, and stood beside his guest, looking pensively up at the portrait.