more control than she could the warm flush of her blood; a child
indeed, full of quick impulses for good or for evil.

Markham rose, knocked the ash out of his pipe, walked over to his
canvas, set it up against the porch pillar and examined it leisurely.
But in a moment he took it indoors and added it to the pile in the
living-room, fetching a fresh canvas and carrying his easel and
paint-box over the hill to another spot, a shady one among the rocks
where he had already painted many times.

He worked a while and then sat and smoked again, his thoughts afar.
What sort of an influence was Olga Tcherny for the mind of this
impressionable child? The Countess was clever, generous and
wonderfully attractive to men and to women but, as Markham knew, her
views of life were liberal and she was not wise--at least, not with a
wisdom which would help Hermia Challoner. One doesn't live for ten
years in Paris in the set in which Markham had met her without
absorbing something of its careless creed, its loose ethical and moral
standards. New York society, he knew, reflected much that was bad,
and much that was good of the gay worlds of Paris and London; for
Americans are unexcelled in the talent of imitation, but from phrases
that had passed Olga's lips he knew that she had outgrown her own
country.

Markham tried to paint but things went wrong and so he gave it up,
swearing silently at the interruption which had spoiled his day. After
lunch he tried it again with no better success, and finally gave it up
and, taking a book, went out on a point of rocks where the tide swirled
and cast in a fishing line, not because he hoped to catch anything but
because fishing, of all the resources available, had most surely the