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FLAMING

YOUTH

personality, all the more engaging for that touch of the exotic, that hint of potential romance which the men of her acquaintance did not have. No woman would have called him handsome. His features were too irregular, and the finely modclled forehead was scarred vertically with a savagely deep V which mercifully lost itself in the clustering hair, a testimony to active war service. There was confident distinction in his bearing, and an atmosphere of quiet and somewhat ironic worldliness in voice and manner. He looked to be a man who had experimented much with life in its larger meanings and found it amusing but perhaps not fulfilling. Reckoning him contemporaneously with the implication of that betraying “Mona!” of his first utterance, Constance thought: “He must be nearly forty to have been one of Mother’s suitors. But he looks hardly over thirty.” She heard him sigh as he drew his spirit back from far

distances, and was sensitive to the power of control implied in the composed countenance which he turned to her. “You should be Constance Fentriss.”

“Constance Browning,” she corrected. “I’m an old married woman of two years’ standing.” “Grand Dieu!” he muttered. “I think of you always as hardly more than a child, As I used to hear about you. One loses touch.” “You had not seen my mother for a long time, had you?” “Very long. Many years. But one does not forget her kind.” Constance, who had not seated herself during this passage of speech, crossed to the mantel, and lifted from

it a heavily framed photograph which she placed in the visitor’s hands. | “That was taken a few months before she died.”