"I heard tell in those days," Molly was saying to Mrs. Leroy, "of a dozen men in the South you might have married. How did you come"--curiously--"in the end to marry Captain Leroy, so much older, and so quiet, and--er--" Charlotte was too simple to resent the question, which to her meant only affectionate interest. Besides, she was an egotist, and livened under talk of herself. She had no concealment; indeed, had she been cognizant of any skeleton in the family closet, it must speedily have lost its gruesomeness to her, so constantly would she have it out, annotating its anatomy to any who showed interest. "Because he came to us in our trouble," said Charlotte, "to mother and me when father died. He was shot, my father, you know, in a political quarrel on the street in Lexington, the year before the war. And Captain Georges came to us. We'd always known him. His father and my Uncle Spottswood Love operated the first brandy distillery in Kentucky. Captain Georges had brought me pretty things from New Orleans and Paris all my life. I meant never to marry, then; I'd been unhappy. But it turned out we were poor, and so when Georges said for me to marry him that he might care for mother and me, why--" "Oh," breathed Alexina. It was denunciation. Certain scenes of childhood had burned into her memory, which she had interpreted later. Molly had not loved daddy, either. "No one was ever so good, so nobly, generously good to a woman as Georges has been to me," Mrs. Leroy was saying; "and even in our poverty he and Willy have managed, and kept it somehow from me, and long, oh, long ago, I came to love him dearly." The young arraigner, hearing, gazed unconvinced. She pushed the weight of her hair back off her forehead, as she always did when impatient. "Came to love him dearly." With that mere affection which grows from association, and dependence and habit. The girl sitting on the window-sill in the sunshine drew a long breath. There was more in life than these two had found; all unknowingly, they had proved it. CHAPTER SEVEN Charlotte kept them with her the week, then Molly turned restless. "I can't stand hearing another thing about Willy, Malise," she declared. "I think he's a very dictatorial and outspoken person myself." So Molly and Alexina and Celeste went back to the hotel, which had filled during the week of their absence. There was life and bustle in the halls as they went in and, from their windows up-stairs, they could see the lake gay with sail-boats.