She was taller than Barbara Summers, whom they both used as a standard for sweet women, but still she was small. Her face was unmistakably Irish; her eyes gray-misted blue, her hair as black as Keefe O’Connor’s. Her mouth was sad and glad at once, and there was a strange, appealing look in her face as of wanting something. She seemed homesick for something—perhaps for something she never had had. The girls felt that if she had a happy time she wouldn’t, in the midst of it, be able to forget sorrow; and that if she were very sorrowful, she would still manage to hold on to joy. Carin said afterward that her face made her think of Ellen Terry’s. Azalea had not, of course, seen this great actress, but she, too, thought somehow of acting. As soon as Mrs. Rowantree began to talk, Azalea felt as if she were in a story book or on the stage. Like Rowantree himself, his wife was dressed in white, but it was, as Azalea could not help noticing, a very old frock with various rents in it, just as Mr. Rowantree’s linen was frayed and ragged. But these things seemed, somehow, to make the “adventure” all the more interesting. Mrs. Rowantree had quick, gay motions, and she walked down the length of the long curious room as if she were tripping on her toes. “Miss Pace, it’s a great pleasure to be meeting you,” she said, not waiting for an introduction, but grasping Miss Zillah’s hand. To Carin and Azalea she said: “Young faces are flowers at the feast!” Her way was so quaintly old-fashioned, so charming, so dramatic, that Azalea again thought of play-acting; yet Mrs. Rowantree was nothing, it seemed, if not sincere. So perhaps it was best, Azalea decided, to think of this as the most charming “really truly” thing that had come her way. Miss Zillah made it known that they were not content to remain in their riding clothes, and Mrs. Rowantree offered their apologies to her husband with pretty ceremony. “The ladies wish to be excused, my dear,” she said. “They have to make themselves more acceptable to the gentlemen.” She contrived to include Keefe in the little bow she swept them. So the four ladies were off up a stairway designed for a magnificent hand rail, but having nothing better in the way of a balustrade than a stout rope strung through posts. Upstairs the appearance of things was even more bare and unsettled than below. The room to which they were taken was that occupied, apparently, by Mr. and Mrs. Rowantree, and here was almost nothing in the way of furniture beyond the beds and a most elaborate dressing case belonging to Rowantree himself, spread out on a table before a triplicate mirror. Opposite it stood another table above which hung a very small mirror, where, it was evident by the meager little feminine articles, Mary Cecily Rowantree made her toilet. The celluloid brushes were in great contrast to the gold-stoppered, tortoise shell contrivances in Mr. Rowantree’s case.