Even in those days there were moments when Nina believed her to be actually irrational, but there was every reason not to say so to the heedless scatterbrain whose father, in the prime of life, sat all day in his room, his faded eyes fixed wistfully on the childish toys which his attendant brought to him from his daughter's nursery.
All this Nina was remembering; and again she wondered bitterly at Alixe's treatment of her brother, and what explanation there could ever be for it--except one.
Lately, too, Alixe had scarcely been at pains to conceal her contempt for her husband, if what Rosamund related was true.

It was only one more headlong scrape, this second marriage, and Nina knew Alixe well enough to expect the usual stampede toward that gay phantom which was always beckoning onward to promised happiness--that goal of heart's desire already lying so far behind her--and farther still for every step her little flying feet were taking in the oldest, the vainest, the most hopeless chase in the world--the headlong hunt for happiness.
And if that blind hunt should lead once more toward Selwyn?
Suppose, freed from Ruthven, she turned in her tracks and threw herself and her youthful unhappiness straight at the man who had not yet destroyed the picture that Nina found when she visited her brother's rooms with the desire to be good to him with rocking-chairs! Not that she really believed or feared that Philip would consider such an impossible reconciliation; pride, and a sense of the absurd, must always check any such weird caprice of her brother's conscience; and yet--and yet other amazing and mismated couples had done it--had been reunited.
And Nina was mightily troubled, for Alixe's capacity for mischief was boundless; and that she, in some manner, had already succeeded in stirring up Philip, was a rumour that persisted and would not be annihilated.
To inform a man frankly that a young girl is a little in love with him is one of the oldest, simplest, and easiest methods of interesting that man--unless he happen to be in love with somebody else.

And Nina had taken her chances that the picture of Alixe was already too unimportant for the ceremony of incineration.

Besides, what she had ventured to say to him was her belief; the child appeared to be utterly absorbed in her increasing intimacy with Selwyn.

She talked of little else; her theme was Selwyn--his influence on Gerald, and her delight in his companionship.