move vast forces. She had been in tragedies, if an inviolable coolness of head, perhaps of heart, had shielded her from being of them. The husband of her youth, the nearest of her blood, the friends of her middle life—all had gone into the dark; yet here she sat, with her smooth skin and her still lustrous eyes and her fragrant hands, keenly smiling over her solitaire. The colonel wondered if he could ever reconcile himself with such philosophy to his own narrowed and emptied life; she was older than he, yet she could still find a zest in existence. All the great passions gone; all the big interests; and still her clever mind was working, happy, possibly, in its mere exercise, disdaining the stake, she who had had every success. What a vitality! He looked at her, puzzling. Her complexity bewildered him, he not being of a complex nature himself. As he looked, suddenly he found himself questioning why her face, in its revival of youthful smoothness and tint, recalled some other face, recently studied by him—a face that had worn an absolutely[39] different expression; having the same delicate aquiline nose, the same oval contour, the same wide brows—who? who? queried the colonel. Then he nodded. Of course; it was the man with the moles, the brother. He looked enough like Mrs. Winter to be her kinsman. At once he put his guess to the test. “Aunt Becky,” said he, “have you any kin I don’t know about?”

[37]

[38]

[39]

“I reckon not. I’m an awfully kinless old party,” said she serenely. “I was a Winter, born as well as married, and so you and Mel and Archie are double kin to me. I was an only child, so I haven’t anything closer than third or fourth cousins, down in Virginia and Boston.”

“Have you, by chance, any cousin, near or far, named Mercer?”

Resting her finger-tips on the cards, Aunt Rebecca seemed to let her mind search amid Virginian and Massachusetts genealogical tables. “Why, certainly,” she answered after a pause, “there was General Philemon Mercer—Confederate army, you know—and his son, Sam Nelson; Phil was my own cousin and Sam Nelson my second, and Sam Nelson’s sons would be my third, wouldn’t they? Phil and Sam are both dead, and Winnie Lee, the daughter, is dead, and poor Phil—the[40] grandson, you know—poor boy, he shot himself while at Harvard; but his brother Cary is alive.”

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