"I'll forget what you said," Mr. Dugald promised, knowing perfectly well that he could not and from that day on he never asked any more questions of Sidney concerning her family. "I'm not playing fair," he said to himself but not to her. To "Dorothea" Sidney confided her chagrin. "I didn't say _much_--just that Trude had had one heartbreaking affair with a man she met at Mrs. White's and that I didn't believe she'd gotten over it yet. I read a book once where it said pity was akin to love and I thought if Mr. Dugald _knew_ that Trude's heart was broken he would feel very sorry for her. But he looked so embarrassed that I knew I had not been maidenly as Isolde would say and I blushed furiously. He promised to forget it and I think he will. But, oh, perhaps I have defeated my dear purpose for now when I speak of Trude he looks funny as though he was afraid of what I was going to say next. I am in despair." The sound of voices, one unmistakably Mr. Dugald's, disturbed Sidney's musings. She thrust "Dorothea" into the secret shelf and locked it. Then she peeped out of the window. Mr. Dugald and Miss Letty Vine approached down the narrow path of hard sand straight toward the willows. Sidney's first impulse was to call to them; in the next moment she realized that they had no intention of climbing to Top Notch. Miss Vine wore heavy gloves on her hands and carried a trowel and a basket and was making little jumps here and there among the weeds in search of "specimens." Sidney sat very still and watched her. She thought Miss Letty the most interesting person, anyway. She always looked like the figurehead of a ship come to life, as Mr. Dugald had described her. She was very tall and bony, with huge bones that made lumps in her shoulders and elbows and even at her knees; her temples protruded and her cheek-bones and her jaw. She had long fingers with prominent knuckles. Miss Letty always wore a style of dress that she had evolved for herself long ago and that was plainly built for comfort rather than style or beauty. She held any grace of trimming as "froppery" and scorned it, going always unadorned. She wore her "learning" just as she wore her clothes. That she had gone to school in Boston and studied music there no one would ever know from anything she said. One just thought of Miss Letty as being _born_ with knowledge, the way she was born capable. "Capable from the cradle," Aunt Achsa sometimes said. Everyone liked Miss Letty in spite of the bones and the sharp tongue and the freakish dresses, and no one knew exactly why; it might have been her eyes which were kindly and had little twinkles deep-set within their irises, or her way of knowing the thing to do and going ahead and doing it. Everyone respected Miss Letty and acknowledged her worth at once.