FLAMING
YOUTH
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to beauty in all its implications, inner and outer, he felt the enveloping atmosphere of her youth and sweetness, and sought, to match it, the swift intelligence, the eager responsiveness which had been Mona’s. Had the daughter inherited these qualities of the mother? If she had, she would be irresistible. Mona Fentriss, whatever relations she had maintained,
in her wayward, laughing course of life, with other men (wholly unknown and unsuspected by Cary Scott) had been to him all that was demanded by the ideal which he himself had formed of her; had given him a friendship infinitely wise and sweet and clear in spirit. Of Constance he had asked the chance to win a like friendship. Yet in his heart, at once hopeful by instinct, and cynical by experience, he knew from the evidence of those hungering eyes, that if she gave at all it would be more than friendship. And, if she chose to give, would he choose to take? From Mona’s daughter, at once so subtly like and unlike Mona? Was he already a little in love with her? ‘The question was still unsolved when he went to sleep. After he left, Constance returned to her book.
Pres-
ently it dropped from her hand. Dreams seeped into the craving eyes. Her husband found her so when he came in at midnight. “What are you mooning over, Con?” he said testily. He was prone to the impatient mood when he had had too much to drink. “J?” answered his wife. “Oh! Ghosts.” “Rats !? said Fred Browning. “Come to bed.”
