"She knows there'll be nothing told bad if it's told by me," she said; "besides," added the woman, "I'm telling you this because you're the first person as has come into this house as I'd care to see stay in, and that's the truth. My dear," said the maid, straightening herself for a minute, "she wants a friend awful badly. Some one different to me. There's things she could talk to you about which she couldn't talk to me. I'd like you to know, now you're starting out, just what she is, and why things seem to go so crookedly. How do you expect her to keep account of pennies when she was brought up in the way she was? I always 'oped her ladyship was going to stand by Miss Camilla, and so I think she would have done if only there hadn't been that miserable marriage!" Dennis was silent for a while, then she said-- "Poor Sir Edmund, he just broke his heart when Miss Camilla run off with Captain Lancing. I'll never forget his look the day he came to her ladyship's house and asked if we could any of us give him news of his girl!" Dennis was running her hand into a pile of stockings all riddled with holes. "You see he'd never taken any heed of the fact, as Miss Camilla was a beauty." She talked on. "He'd always laughed when her ladyship kept on as he ought to have a governess or somebody about with Miss Camilla. He looked on her as no more nor a child. And so she was a child," said Dennis, hotly, as if she were suddenly defending her mistress against some accuser, and she flung the stockings on to the table viciously. "How could _she_ know what she was doing? Wasn't he handsome enough to turn the head of any girl? Who was to think that he'd be such a blackguard, and he coming of such a sanctimonious church-going lot? People as turn their noses up at everybody who hasn't got the Lord's Prayer printed on their backs! If them sort of folk is saints, give me sinners, I say!" "I think four pairs of stockings each will do for the winter," Caroline said here. She was fascinated, even excited by this story of Camilla Lancing's early history; at the same time, she shrank from hearing these things unknown to Camilla. But when Dennis was started on this subject it was hard to stop her.