“How about Archie? Can he play a good game?”

[36]“Very fair for a boy of fourteen; he was fond of whist until his troubles came,” said Mrs. Winter, with a faint clouding of her keen gaze. “Since then he hasn’t taken much interest in anything. Janet has brightened him up more than any one; and when he heard you were coming that did rouse him. You are one of his heroes. He’s that sort of a boy,” she added, with a tinge of impatience in her soft Southern voice. As if to divert her thoughts, she began deftly moving the cards before her. Her hands showed the blue veins more prominently than they show in young hands. This was their only surrender to time; they were shapely and white, and the slim fingers were as straight as when the beaux of Fairfax County would have ridden all day for a chance to kiss them.

[36]

The colonel watched the great ruby wink and glow. The ruby was a part of his memories of his aunt; she had always worn it. He remembered it, when she used to come and visit him at the hotel at West Point, dazzling impartially officers, professors, cadets and hotel waiters. Was that almost forty years ago? Well, thirty-four, anyhow! She had been very good, very generous to all the young Winters, then. Indeed, although[37] she never quite forgave him for not marrying the wife of her selecting, she had always been kind and generous to Rupert; yet, somehow, while he had admired and found a humorous joy in his Aunt Rebecca, he wondered if he had ever loved her. She was both beautiful and brilliant when she was young, a Southern belle, a Northern society leader; her life was full of conquests; her footsteps, which had wandered over the world, had left a phosphorescent wake of admiration. She had always been a personage. She was a power in Washington after the war; they had found her uniquely delightful in royal courts long before Americans were the fashion; she had been of importance in New York, and they had loved her epigrams in Boston; now, in her old age, she held a veritable little court of her own in the provincial Western city which had been her husband’s home. He went to Congress from Fairport; he had made a fortune there, and when he died, many years ago, in Egypt, back to his Western home, with dogged determination and lavish expenditures of both money and wit, his widow had brought him to rest. The most intense and solemn experience of a woman she had missed, for no children had come to them, but her husband[38] had been her lover so long as he lived, and she had loved him. She had known great men; she had lived through wonderful events; and often her hand had been on those secret levers which 

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