“I don’t try. I curl my hair, and that is all. I don’t know a thing about fashion,” she said, while Maude, who had succeeded in winding her satin braids, coil after coil, about her head, until the last one came almost to her forehead, replied, “Your curls are lovely. I would not meddle with them. Fashion is an exacting dame, but Aunt Burton and Georgie make such a fuss if I do not try to be decent.” “Who is Georgie?” Edna asked, feeling guilty for the deception she was practising. “Georgie is Aunt Burton’s adopted daughter and niece, while I am Uncle Burton’s relation, which makes a vast difference,” Maude replied. “She is a belle and a beauty, and an heiress, while I, as I told you, am poor, and a schoolma’am, and nobody but ‘that young girl who lives with Mrs. Burton.’” Edna had made no attempt at arranging her own toilet, but completely fascinated with her visitor, stood leaning on the bureau, watching the young girl who rattled on so fast, and who, while pleading poverty, arrayed herself in a soft, flowing dress of shining blue silk, which harmonized so admirably with her fair, creamy complexion. “One of Georgie’s cast-offs,” she explained to Edna. “Most of my wardrobe comes to me that way. I am fortunate in one respect; fortunate in everything, perhaps, for everybody is kind to me. Look, please, at my beautiful Christmas present, the very thing of all others which I coveted, but never expected to have.” She took from the little box on the bureau a gold watch and chain, and passed it to Edna, who held it in her hand, and with a face as pale as ashes, turned to the window as if to see it better, while only the most superhuman effort at control on her part kept her from crying outright, for there lying in her hand, with the old familiar ticking sounding in her ear, was _her watch_, the one Charlie had given to her, and which she had left in Albany. There could be no mistake. She knew it was the very same, and through it she seemed again to grasp the dead hand of her husband, just as she had grasped it that awful night when he lay beneath the wreck, with the rain falling on his lifeless face. Edna felt as if she should faint, and was glad of Maude’s absorption in a box of collars and bows, as that gave her a little time in which to recover herself. When she felt that she could speak, she laid the watch back upon the bureau, carefully, tenderly, as if it had been the dead body of a friend, and said: “It is a charming Christmas gift. Your aunt’s, I suppose?” She knew she ran the risk of seeming inquisitive by the last remark, but she wanted so much to know how that watch of all others came into Maude Somerton’s possession. “No, you don’t catch her making me as costly a present as that. She selected it, but Roy Leighton paid for it.”