on the wrong track, so that he would never look for me among the cultivated, scholarly, useful women, whom I intended to lead before I was forty. And besides, I felt it would give him an idea of the fact that all women are the sisters of all men, and that a man is a felon if he betrays their trust. So I thought this letter hit off all these things pretty well; don’t you see that it did? “Well, we travelled everywhere, Mr. Mancredo and I, and I cultivated a leisurely, haughty manner, and grew high-colored, with magnificent eyes, they said, and then I knew how to dress. And people commonly called me ‘Mrs. Mancredo.’ Sometimes I corrected it and sometimes I did not. The world was so full of tangles that I scorned to bother myself about names. I knew how staunch I was. And besides, I had such an innate passion for chastity and continence, that the other sort of life seemed as idiotic to me as to have dashed my brains out a little every day would have seemed. Dear old Mancredo called me a very brainy woman, and I valued that, and I enjoyed being good without letting anybody know it, if you can imagine such a notion. But then, always, Miss Ethel, I have devotedly loved my guardian angel.” She became silent, and the silence was preserved. Then— “We lived in Italy several years. My mother was an Italian, and so was Mr. Mancredo, and I felt to be the middle-aged, rich Italian woman whom, by adapting myself to dear Mr. Mancredo’s language and needs, in his lameness, I was becoming. When he died I was as much a widowed heart as if I had been his wife. He called me always a truthful, sound nature, and encouraged me to believe that my last ‘slap’ at Reginald would sicken him of vice, which, by the way, he curiously enough did not believe Reginald was particularly guilty of. He said the false conditions of woman’s environment had cultivated lack of frankness in me, and that a certain sort of farcical manœuvering even now made me like to put people in the wrong, to my own disadvantage, rather than to allow them to intrude on my business, which is true. ‘You are too fond of being privately good,’ said he, which was a funny fact. “After everything was over and I had gotten back to America, Mr. Mancredo’s lawyer (and he was my guardian) wanted me to come down on old Grove, whose touch was turning everything to gold. They had come out West here, and Reg was riding the social wave buoyed up by my money, and I decided to come West and take a look at him, with the agreement that at a word from me my lawyer should come on and fetch old Grove with him, for he was under close surveillance on two accounts.