Clasping her hand to her head as if smitten with a blow, Margery staggered back, and leaning against the wall for support, tried to think what it all meant, while her mind traveled rapidly back over the past, gathering up a thread here and there, until she had no doubt that what Queenie had told her was true. Her mother _was_ Christine Bodine. But why this concealment? What was she hiding? What had she done? Margery’s first impulse was to hurry to her mother’s room, where there was already the sound of excited voices, her mother’s and Queenie’s blended together, as each strove to be heard, and once she caught her own name, as if her mother were calling her to come. Then she did start, and was half way up the stairs, when the door-bell rang violently—a sharp, imperious ring, which she recognized as Anna Ferguson’s. She was expecting that young lady, and knowing that however fierce a storm might be blowing, she must keep it from the world, she calmed herself with a tremendous effort, and opening the door to Anna, listened patiently for several minutes, while the girl examined her sacque and said it would do very well, only the price was too high. “Ma never asked anything like that for a common sacque.” “Very well. Pay me what you like,” Margery said, anxious to be rid of her customer, who had asked, in her supercilious way: “Isn’t that Queenie up stairs? And isn’t she talking pretty loud for a well-bred person?” “Oh, will she never go?” Margery thought, just as the bell pealed a second time, and Grandma Ferguson came in, bringing a bundle almost as large as herself, and entering at once into full details of what she wished to have made, and how. “I s’pose Anny is goin’ to be married,” she said, looking hard at her granddaughter, “though she hain’t noticed me enough to tell me so, right out; but everybody’s talkin’ it, and I thought I might as well have a new silk gown. My _moiry antique_ is pretty well whipped out, and a nice silk is allus handy. I got brown—a nice shade, I call it,” and she unrolled a silk of excellent quality, but of a yellowish brown, which would be very unbecoming to her. “Oh, grandma, why didn’t you get black instead of that horrid snuff-color?” Anna said, contemptuously, as she glanced at the silk, and then went out, leaving the old lady a good deal crest-fallen, and a little doubtful with regard to the dress she had lately thought so pretty.