evening parties of which they never tired. They had always kissed her
before they went, looking, she used to think, as beautiful as
princesses.

'And men like what they fear,' Caroline added.

'Yes, dear,' Sophia said. A natural flush appeared round the delicate
dabs of rouge. She hoped she might be forgiven for her tender deceits.
Those young men in the white waistcoats had often laughed at Caroline
rather than at her wit; she was, as Sophia had shrinkingly divined, as
often as not their butt, and dear Caroline had never known it; she
must never know it, never know it. She drew half her happiness from
the past, as, so differently, Sophia did herself, and, drooping a
little, her thoughts went farther back to the last year of her teens
when a pale and penniless young man had been her secret suitor, had
gone to America to make his fortune there--and died. She had told no
one; Caroline would have scorned him because he was shy and timid, and
he had not had time to earn enough to keep her; he had not had time.
She had a faded photograph of him pushed away at the back of a drawer
of the walnut bureau in the bedroom she shared with Caroline, a pale
young man wearing a collar too large for his thin neck, a young man
with kind, honest eyes. It was a grief to her that she could not wear
that photograph in a locket near her heart, but Caroline would have
found out. They had slept in the same bed since they were children,
and nothing could be hidden from her except the love she still
cherished in her heart. Some day she meant to burn that photograph
lest unsympathetic hands should touch it when she died; but death
still seemed far off, and sometimes, even while she was talking to
Caroline, she would pretend to rummage in the drawer, and for a moment
she would close her hand upon the photograph to tell him she had not