“It is very strange that she should know our cousin so well,” Ethel said. “I mean to sound her on the subject, and hear what she has to say,” and as it was time for Mrs. Rossiter to take her airing in her invalid chair the conference broke up, and on pretext of seeing to her dress Ethel went into the room where Margery now sat sewing as quietly and composedly as if she had never heard of Queenie Hetherton. CHAPTER XVI. MARGERY LA RUE. She was a tall, beautiful blonde, with reddish golden hair, and lustrous blue eyes shaded with long curling eyelashes and heavy eyebrows, which made them seem darker than they really were. The features were finely cut and perfectly regular, and the whole face and figure were of that refined, delicate, type supposed to belong mostly to the upper classes in whose veins the purest of patrician blood is flowing. She said she was twenty-one, but she seemed older on account of that air of independence and self-reliance habitual to persons accustomed to care and think for themselves. She had come to America the April previous and stopped at Martha’s Vineyard with her mother, who was short, and stout, and dark, but rather prepossessing in her manner, with more signs of culture and education than is usual with the ordinary type of French woman. In her girlhood she must have been very pretty and attractive, with her bright complexion and large black eyes, which had not yet lost their brilliancy, though there was in them a sad thoughtful expression, as if she were continually haunted with some bitter memory. Margery had been introduced to the Misses Rossiter by a friend from Boston who had employed her in Paris, but occupied as they were with their mother and the gay world around them, they had hardly thought whether she were unusually pretty or not, until Phil electrified them with the news that she was the friend of their cousin, who said she was beautiful. “I will look at her now for myself,” Ethel thought, as she entered the room where Margery sat sewing, with a deep flush on her cheek and a bright, eager look in the blue eyes lifted respectfully but inquiringly to the face of her employer.