"Pritchard," she said as quickly as she could get it out. "_Pritchard?_" he repeated as if he must have heard wrong. "Augusta Pritchard," the girl reiterated, her heart like a stone. The artist was puzzled. But realizing that the loss of her mother might have been so recent as to be still a painful subject, he tactfully spoke of other things, cloaking his disappointment at not being able to work out his problem to final solution. He feared lest he might somehow have blundered upon some sad family secret. Even with twenty years between them, he couldn't believe that his senses had so deceived him, couldn't but feel that that young girl had been connected with this girl of the big dimples. And he couldn't but believe that the girl knew it. Only there was something that prevented her acknowledging it. It might be tragedy; perhaps it was disgrace? Though, somehow, he couldn't think it. Poor little thing! He let her go on her way to her bath. But Elsie returned to the hotel and went straight to her room. She knew she would be undisturbed there, for Miss Pritchard had gone driving with old friends while she was to have had her swim. The girl flung herself upon her bed and, burying her face in her pillow, shed the bitterest tears of her life. She had denied her mother--that darling, adorable mother who had taken the sticky baby to her heart, and sung "Elsie Marley" to him, just as she had later sung it to her own little girl. She had cast off her mother and taken on--_Augusta Pritchard_! What a name to exchange for Elizabeth Middleton! For even though the former were the mother of the lovely Elsie Marley who had gone to Enderby, she couldn't be compared with her beautiful mother. And, of course, her denial was far worse in that she was dead. How proud, how happy, how humble, she should have been to say: "Why, of course, that was my mother! I knew it without the dimples!" What a wretch she must be! To have had such a mother as to have so impressed a chance stranger that he should wish to paint the Madonna in her likeness, and should have remembered her twenty years, and to have repudiated her utterly! She felt that she could not bear it, could not endure such a weight on her heart. But what could she do? Say to Mr. Graham that it _was_ her mother and her name _was_ Middleton? Then she would have to tell Cousin Julia everything, and she would send her away, send her off to poke and fret in Enderby, and serve tea in a conventional parsonage drawing-room. And she would never be an actress, and the true Elsie Marley would be dragged on to New York.