Now that I know the sequel, and understand what the beginning meant, I cannot recall our laughter over Molly's first experiences without a thrill of horror. The nuns had placed her with titled folk--Lord and Lady E., with whom lived Lady E.'s father, an old earl, a widower. Molly was the most ingenuous and garrulous of creatures. She spent her first vacation some months later with us, and kept us at recreation hour in shouts of laughter and scorn over her adventures. The old earl was the most extraordinary old man, according to her. He was always meeting her alone, here, there, and everywhere. She seemed to think it was a sort of schoolboy's game. Once he showed her in the garden, when no one was by, a splendid diamond bracelet, which he had bought for her. "O Molly!" we all screamed in joy, "he wants to marry you, and you'll be a grand countess, like the gipsy maiden of the song." But Molly curled her lips haughtily. Did we know that he was seventy, a queer old gentleman, just fit to be tucked into bed and given gruel? The suspicion of evil design never once entered her innocent head, for the simple reason that she had not the ghost of a suspicion of any kind of evil. Then Lady E. went up to town, and left this bewitching creature at the mercy of her husband. Molly again regarded it in the light of a capital game. The aged earl and his middle-aged son-in-law appeared to be on strained terms. The poor goose never suspected why. Lord E. insisted on her sitting in his wife's place at table--and still she suspected nothing. One night, she told us, shrieking with laughter as at the height of the grotesque, Lord E. mistook her room for the nursery, and entered it in his shirt. Not the faintest feeling of anger or fear on the part of this blind, silly maid. All she did was to go into convulsions of laughter, "because he looked so ugly and so ridiculous." But it was still part of the high old game of life, where everything happens to send one into fits of laughter. That tears, that trouble, that shame and blighting misery lay in wait for her, this radiant, unconscious, ignorant, and foolish innocent could not then suspect. We, too, thought it a splendid game, laughed heartily at the ridiculous figure she described Lord E. as cutting in his nightshirt, agreed with her that the old earl was a monstrous old fool to go skipping in that absurd way down the park avenues with her, putting his hand upon his heart, sighing and talking in a wild incoherent way about "the loveliest girl on earth," whom Molly, the least vain of creatures, never for one moment suspected was herself. For she was far too busy laughing at people to understand them. You had but to stand solemnly before her, and say, "It's a wet day," and off she was on a ringing cascade. What you said she probably did not understand in the least; but the expression of your eye, the tone of your voice, made her laugh.