The old lady sighed heavily, although her eyes flashed with temper. “Well! I shan’t live long enough to see you come to your senses; but just mark my words: you are a woman, a female, as you choose to call it, much as you may resent the fact; and trying to look like a boy does not make you one. You may hold yourself like a ramrod, but you have a graceful body if it is as thin as a plank, and the fine points of the Carterets. You have a lovely round throat and your eyelashes would make any boy ridiculous. Oh, yes, you are a girl, my dear, you are a girl. Don’t grind your teeth. It’s bad for the enamel. Now run out and take a walk. It’s time for my nap—and I hear the starched petticoats of that nurse.” CHAPTER II Gita stood with her hands in the pockets of her sport skirt surveying the old manor house from the drive. It was built of oblong blocks of stone obviously cemented together in the fashion of so many Northern Colonial mansions: a great square box of a house, surmounted by a gabled roof; without architectural grace but solid and imposing, and immune to the elements and time. The gardener was as old as her grandmother and the lawns were thin, the rose-bushes and other flowering plants looked as senile as himself. But the pine woods on three sides were beautiful and dim and old, and Gita was conscious of a thrill of pride in her inheritance. She frowned, then shrugged her shoulders philosophically. “Why not? It’s all I’ve got. And perhaps a background is something to lean against, anyhow.” She would not admit that she had felt curiously at home from the hour of her arrival. She sauntered out of the park and across the bridge of the Thoroughfare, a narrow body of salt water dividing the mainland from the most famous of its islands. Atlantic City amused her, but she did not turn toward the town. Some distance to the south, below the hotels, the Boardwalk had been demolished during a storm uncommonly heavy for even that wild part of the Atlantic coast; with its record, during the days of sailing vessels, of thousands of wrecks and bodies washed ashore, of evil men and false lights and ghouls crouching in wait.