"I have just the same here that I have at the Exchange," she said, opening the doors. The visitor followed her. In the gray of the afternoon the long room, with its tiers of plants and its bare sideboard and mantelpiece, looked even colder and drearier than the drawing-room. Viola opened a cupboard and indicated the lines of glass jars standing on the shelves. She tried to be businesslike, and told their contents and prices, but her voice betrayed her. Letitia, listening to her and staring at the Chinese cracker-jar that was the sole adornment of the sideboard, suddenly felt sick with disgust at herself for intruding, at her sister, at John Gault. As Viola's voice went on,--"These are apricots; they're fifty cents. Those on that shelf are strawberry and raspberry; they are only thirty,"--Letitia's shame and indignation worked up to a climax and a resultant resolution. She took up one of the glasses and, looking at the legend written in neat script on the paper top, said: "I think I ought to tell you how I happened to come here. It's really a secret and you mustn't tell. What I said at first was not quite the case. No one at our house knows anything about this but me. I'm going to buy these preserves for my brother-in-law and tell him I made them. I'm going to fool him. Do you understand? It's just a little joke." Letitia delivered herself of this amazing effort at invention with admirable composure, for it was the first elaborate and important falsehood she had ever told in her life. Viola, turning from her contemplation of the shelves, looked at her, relieved but not quite comprehending. "So I hunted you up myself at the Exchange," continued Letitia, plunging deeper into the slough of deception, but knowing now that she had gone too far to compromise with truth, "and came here myself this way so as to keep it all dark." Viola's face had cleared with each word. As the other ended, her lips parted in the smile that John Gault found at once so irresistible and so enigmatic. Letitia found nothing enigmatic in it. She only thought, with a piercing dart of pain, "She is still prettier when she smiles." "It's very amusing," said Viola; "but why do you want to fool him?" Letitia was even ready for this, so expert does the first lie make us in perpetrating the second. "He says I am useless and can't do anything. I am going to show him that I can make jam." Viola was rather shocked, but relief and amusement combined to make her light-hearted, and this time she laughed. "But the writing," she said. "Won't he see by that that it's not yours? There's writing on every glass." "Oh, that will be all right. I'll have the Chinaman put it out in a dish. But you'll promise not to give me away?" "Oh, I never will," said Viola. "In fact," she continued naïvely, "I'd rather have it that way myself. You see, many people--all people, that is--don't know that I do this."