Miss Burton, with her keen, delicate perceptions, recognized this difference more fully than any of the others; and her instinct, rather than anything she saw in Ida, enabled her to divine the cause in part. "I know of but one thing that can account for Miss Mayhew's behavior," she thought, "and though she guards her secret well, she cannot deceive a woman who has passed through my experience. I begin to see it all. She used Sibley as a blind, and she was blind herself, poor child, when she did so, to everything save the one womanly necessity of hiding an unsought love. Well, well, my outspoken lover has eyes for her sweet, chastened beauty to-night. Perhaps he thinks he is studying her face as an artist. Perhaps he is. But it strikes me that he has lost the critical and judicial expression which I have noticed hitherto," and a glimmer of a smile that did not in the least suggest the "green-eyed monster" hovered for a moment like a ray of light over Jennie Burton's face. "Mother," said Ida, in a low, sympathetic tone, "I see one of your headaches coming on. Let me bathe your head after tea." "Ida," whispered Mrs. Mayhew, "you are so changed I don't know you." The young girl flushed slightly, and by a quick, warning look checked all further remark of this tendency. "She is indeed marvelously changed," thought Miss Burton. "I feel it even more than I can see it. There must be some other influence at work. Who are these friends she is visiting, and who send her back to us daily with some unexpected grace? Yesterday it was truthfulness--to-day an indescribable charm of manner that has banished the element of earthiness from her beauty. I think I will join my friend (who imagines himself something more) in the study of a problem that is becoming intensely interesting." "Miss Mayhew," Van Berg found a chance to say after supper, "you are becoming a greater enigma to me than ever." "Well," she replied, averting her face to hide the color that would rise at his rather abrupt and pointed address, "I'd rather be a Chinese puzzle to you than what I was." "And I no doubt have appeared to you like a Chinese Mandarin, Grand Turk, Great Mogul, not name self-satisfied Pharisees, and all of that ilk." "I can't say that you have, and yet I've keenly felt your superiority. I think the character you are now enacting is more becoming than any of those would be, however." "What is that?" he asked quickly. "Well," she said hesitatingly, "I hardly know how to describe it, but it suggests a little the kindness which, they say, makes all the world kin. Good-night, Mr. Van Berg." "Miss Jennie," he said, later in the evening, "you have an insight into character which we grosser mortals do not possess. Do you think that there is a marked change taking place in Miss Mayhew?" "And so you expect me to read Miss Mayhew's secrets and gossip about them with you?" she answered with one of her piquant smiles.