"Nonsense!" she said. "How can one man be another? I've seen Mr. Black several times. He's a sharp, shrewd, business-looking man who seems to know Mary Cary very well. Whenever he is in town he spends a good deal of time with her, I hear. He may be acting for somebody else, but it is not John Maxwell. The latter is not the kind of man to let anybody else attend to his business." "Well, anyhow, I heard somebody say it was John Maxwell who bought those bonds and didn't want anybody to know it." Miss Puss was not to be crushed by Lizzie Bettie Pryor. "Of course, it's all guesswork, but a lot of money has been spent in this place in the last year. Not only on streets and schools and cleaning up and prizes for the prettiest back-yards and trees and things for Milltown, but on people. A dozen people that I know of were sent off on trips during the summer. People who couldn't afford to go. And it was always the same thing Mary Cary would tell. She'd just laugh and say Yorkburg's friend had asked her to do it. Yorkburg's friend never sent me anywhere. Everybody knows John Maxwell is Mary Cary's friend." "So is Miss Gibbie Gault." Mrs. Tate, who was making tatting on her fingers with Mrs. Burnham's cotton, looked up. "Miss Gibbie is certainly her friend, but I don't suppose anybody would waste time thinking she was doing all these things." "I imagine not!" Mrs. Pryor's voice was decisive. Then her face changed, and with an expression suitable to recent affliction she folded her hands and shook her head. "It is, indeed, distressing," she began, "to see a young girl so defy public opinion as Mary Cary does. For over a year she has been back in Yorkburg, and save for the weeks she was away on a summer holiday there has been no one of them in which she has not been discussed whenever two or three have met together." "She certainly has!" Mrs. Tate's assent was eager, if undesired. "Her coming back has been like the raising of the dead. If there ever was a dull place, it was this one before she came. Somehow since she got here things look like they've taken a tonic, and so do we. Mary always did have a way of making you sit up and take notice and enjoying yourself." Mrs. Pryor touched the bell. "As I was saying, Mary Cary is one of the people--I say it in all charitableness--who will always be talked about, just as--just as--" "The sun would be talked about if it came out at night." Mrs. Tate felt no grudge and helped out willingly.