Miss Maggie puckered her intellectual forehead in deep consideration of the weighty matter. Apparently she reached no conclusion, for after a minute she said: "I’m thinking, Jeanie, that our best course would be to ask Miss Esperance Bethune. She seems very intimate with Lady Alicia Carruthers, and may know her ways, and I’m quite sure she’ll think none the worse of us for asking. She left a card, if you remember." "You might just put on your bonnet and go now, Maggie. It would set our minds at rest. I wish she had left a card, though; it would have looked fine on the table in the lobby, and you mind the Macdougals are coming out to their tea on Saturday." Miss Moffat sought Miss Esperance then and there, and that gentle little lady gave it as her opinion that the omission of the card was mere forgetfulness on Lady Alicia’s part and by no means intentional. Whereupon Miss Maggie departed much comforted. Miss Esperance happened to be dining with Lady Alicia that very evening and told her how much soul-searching her visit had occasioned the Misses Moffat. "Bless me!" good-natured Lady Alicia exclaimed. "The poor bodies! I’d have left a whole card-case of cards if I’d remembered. But they fluttered round me so as I was leaving, and were so civil and obliging and desperately fussy, that I got myself out as quickly as ever I could." "You’d make them very happy if you’d leave a card even yet, any time you are passing," Miss Esperance suggested. "They are such good, meek creatures." So it came to pass that next day, when Lady Alicia went out to drive, the carriage stopped at Rowan Lodge, and she, in a voice that could be heard all down the street, instructed her footman to leave cards, explaining that she had forgotten to leave them the day before. The front door of Rowan Lodge was separated from the footpath by about three feet of gravel, and the Misses Moffat, seated behind the curtains that Lady Alicia had admired, heard her every word. "One for each of us!" exclaimed Miss Jeanie rapturously, gloating over the little white cards, for them so packed with meaning. "I hope it’s not wicked, but I can’t help feeling rather glad poor Mr. Carruthers is no more—though it would have been pleasant enough to have him calling, too—for then, if that book is right, we should only have had his card, and he hadn’t a title or anything." "He was an advocate, I’m told," Miss Maggie said solemnly, "but whether they put that on cards I’m not very sure, never having been called upon by anyone connected with the legal profession except yon wee auctioneer, who came about the fittings at the South-side, and I very much doubt if he had a card at all."