"I am going to refurnish our lower rooms," she said. "If you have time do help me. Heavens! I wish I could work off some of that old furniture on you. I like the Italian pieces well enough, but there are too many of them. That rather low Florentine cabinet in the back parlor would just fit in this corner...." She gave a little girlish exclamation and ran forward. "Isn't that young Gathbroke, who was out here at the time of the earthquake and fire ... or an older brother, perhaps?" She had taken the photograph from the mantel and was examining it under one of the lanterns. Her alert ear detected the deeper and less steady note in Gora's always hoarse voice. "It is the same. Did you meet him? ... Oh, I remember he told me he met you at the Hofer ball. He rather raved over you, in fact." "Did he? How sweet of him. I met him again, I remember. Mr. Gwynne brought him down to Rincona one day." "Oh?" And Alexina, knew that he had never mentioned that visit. "But he looks much much older." "He did before he left. That horrible experience of his seemed to prey on him more and more. "Oh." He had not looked a day over twenty-three on that afternoon at Eincona, two weeks after the fire. Alexina replaced the picture, then turned to her sister-in-law with a coaxing smile. "Are you engaged? It would be too romantic. Do tell me." "No," said Gora, shortly. "We are not engaged. Good friends, that is all, and write occasionally." "Well, he must be very much interested--and you must be a very interesting correspondent, Gora dear! Is he? Interesting, I mean. What does he do, anyhow? I have a vague remembrance that he said something about the army." "He was in the army, the Grenadier Guards. But he has resigned and gone into business with a cousin of his in Lancashire. He wrote me--oh, it must be nearly two years ago--that if there should be a war he would enlist as a matter of course, but as there was no prospect of any, and he was sick of idleness--his good middle-class energetic blood asserting itself, he said,--he was going to amuse himself with work, incidentally try to make a fortune. His mother left a good deal of money, but there are several children and I guess the present earl needs most of it to keep up his estates, to say nothing of his position. Fotten law, that--entail, I mean." Alexina came and sat down on the divan beside Gora, piling the cushions behind her. "Are you a socialist?" "I am not. I believe in sticking to your own class, whether you have a grudge against it or not, or even if you think it far from perfection." She shot a quick challenging glance at her admittedly aristocratic sister-in-law, but Alexina had lifted the lower white of her eyes just above their soft black fringe and looked more innocent than any new born lamb. As she did not answer Gora continued: