“A friend of yours, but he wanted to see your husband. It was Mr. Latham.” “Say, rather, an acquaintance of mine,” was the reply. Cherokee felt that she had no such thing as a friend. She who had been petted and admired saw the change now; the cordial hand held back, the friendly, confidential glance replaced by frowns of almost fierce suspicion and reproach. She observed a gradual but marked difference in her friends’ demeanor toward her. Her greetings were received coldly, though sometimes with scrupulous politeness. Groups began to melt insensibly away at her approach, or her advent was a signal for dead silence. The young women were frigid; the old ones were more so, and systematically cut her dead, and were often heard to say: “They had always thought there was something very queer about this woman.” CHAPTER XXXII. STORMING THE LION’S DEN. It happened that the very day after Robert’s return, he had accepted, for the first time in some months, one of the many invitations which Willard Frost had extended. He had usually declared himself in his notes “Already engaged,” or “Sorry illness makes me forego the pleasure, etc.” Designing Frost, therefore, continued his invitations until Milburn, from that fatality which seemingly regulates and controls us, accepted the proffered invitation. Frost’s apartments were gorgeous. He had made money as well as married it. “Gentlemen,” he said to his three guests, “let me show you the first success I had,” and he pointed to a baby face on the wall. “That study I sold for two thousand dollars to a man who had lost a child about that age, and he had no picture of it; this he fancied looked very much like her.” “It is a marvelous face--so beautiful. Where did you get your model?” Robert asked. “It is my own child.” “What! I did not know you had ever been married until----” Robert paused in awkward confusion. “Until I made my recent ‘fiasco,’” laughed Frost. “Well, whether I have or not, the child’s mother died at its birth--that was lucky.” He saw how the others looked at him when he made this heartless speech, so he added: “You remember those old stony hills of New Hampshire? Well, I was reared there, and perhaps that accounts for so much flint and grit in my make up.” “But mine host,” Robert began, “where is the other rare treat you promised--your latest portrait, that wears a hectic flush and nothing more?” The others, who were listening to the colloquy burst into ripples of merriment. “Ah, so I did promise,” and he seized his glass, and emptied it at a gulp. A gust of cold mist, mingled with fine snow, puffed into the brilliant rooms, and stirred the stifling air that was saturated with exhalations of spirits and tobacco smoke. “And you really would like to see my creation--‘A Nude Daughter of Our Land.’” “Nothing would delight us more,” they declared. He summoned the servant and ordered him to draw the curtain aside. The eager crowd caught his words at once.