“Certainly, I do,” Adelaide returned lightly. “Yes, and I heard you, too, and understood everything that you meant.” Vincent couldn’t help smiling at his stepdaughter’s horrified look. “What a brute you are, Adelaide!” he said. “Oh, my dear, you’re much worse,” she retorted. “You don’t have to overhear. You just read the human heart by some black magic of your own. That’s really more cruel than my gross methods.” “Well, Mathilde,” said Farron, “as a reader of the human heart, I want to tell you that I approve of the young man. He has a fine, delicate touch on life, which, I am inclined to think, goes only with a good deal of strength.” Mathilde blinked her eyes. Gratitude and delight had brought tears to them. “He thinks you’re wonderful, Mr. Farron,” she answered a little huskily. “Better and better,” answered Vincent, and he held out his hand for a letter that Pringle was bringing to him on a tray. “What’s that?” asked Adelaide. One of the first things she had impressed on Joe Severance was that he must never inquire about her mail; but she always asked Farron about his. He seemed to be thinking and didn’t answer her. Mathilde, now simply insatiable, pressed nearer to him and asked: “And what do you think of Mrs. Wayne?” He raised his eyes from the envelope, and answered with a certain absence of tone: “I thought she was an elderly wood-nymph.” Adelaide glanced over his shoulder, and, seeing that the letter had a printed address in the corner, lost interest. “You may shut the house, Pringle,” she said. CHAPTER VII Pringle, the last servant up, was soon heard discreetly drawing bolts and turning out electric lights. Mathilde went straight up-stairs without even an attempt at drawing her mother into an evening gossip. She was aware of being tired after two nights rendered almost sleepless by her awareness of joy. She went to her room and shut the door. Her bed was piled high with extra covers, soft, light blankets and a down coverlet covered with pink silk. She took a certain hygienic pride in the extent to which she always opened her bedroom windows even when, as at present, the night was bitterly cold. In the morning she ran, huddling on her dressing-gown, into a heated bathroom, and when she emerged from this, the maid had always lighted her fire, and laid her breakfast-tray close to the blaze. To-night, when she went to open her window, she noticed that the houses opposite had lost courage and showed only cracks. She stood a second looking up at the stars, twinkling with tiny blue rays through the clear air. By turning her head to the west she could look down on the park, with its surface of bare, blurred tree-branches pierced by rows of lights. The familiar sight suddenly seemed to her almost intolerably beautiful. “Oh, I love him so much!” she said to herself, and her lips actually whispered the words, “so much! so much!”