She rose from the arm of the chair and walked to the window. As she moved the rustle of her rich dress and the perfume it exhaled filled the room. The Colonel looked at her uneasily. It was three weeks since the Davenport ball. She had kept her room for some days after the ball, saying she was sick. After that she had appeared, looking miserably ill, and in manner cold and uncommunicative. She had spoken of Jerry’s engagement to no one, not even to Rosamund. To the Colonel she had been gentle, quiet, and for the first time in their acquaintance indifferent and unresponsive. What her appearance this afternoon portended he could not guess. “Not enough courage!” he now repeated. “Was there ever any time since I’ve known you when you wanted courage to come to me?” “Never before,” she answered, standing with her back to him looking out of the window. Her voice, her attitude, her profile against the pane, were expressive of the completest dejection. She was expensively and beautifully dressed in a crisp silken gown of several shades of blue. Every detail of her appearance was elegant and fastidious. In her years of city life she had developed all the extravagance, the studious consideration of her raiment, of a fashionable woman. Now her costly dress, the jeweled ornaments she wore, her gloves, her hat with its long blue feather that rested on her bright-colored hair, the tip of the shoe that peeped from her skirt, combined to make her a figure of notable feminine finish and distinction. And surrounded by this elaboration of careful daintiness, her heaviness of spirit seemed thrown up into higher relief. “Come, sit down,” said the Colonel, rolling the chair toward her. “I can’t talk comfortably to you when you stand there with your back to me looking out of the window as if we’d been quarreling.” She returned to the chair and obediently sank into it. Her hands hung over its arms, one of them languidly holding the umbrella. He had thought his suggestion about quarreling would make her laugh, but she did not seem to have heard it. “And now,” he said, drawing a chair up beside her, “let’s hear what it is you hadn’t the courage to tell to your Uncle Jim? Have you been robbing or murdering, or what?” “I’ve been staying in the house mostly, looking out of the window. I--don’t feel much like going out. I--oh, Uncle Jim,” she said, suddenly turning her head as it rested on the chair-back and letting her eyes dwell on his, “I’ve been so miserable!” He leaned forward and took her hand. He had nothing to say. Her words needed no further commentary than that furnished by her appearance. With the afternoon light shining on her face, she looked a woman of thirty, worn and thin. All the freshness of the young girl was gone.