Rose usually acted upon her impulses, and was soon in her carriage, with a huge basket at her feet and the little girl opposite, enjoying her ride so much, and enjoying it the more for the unmistakable signs of envy and wonder which she detected in the faces of her companions as she neared her humble home in the hollow. Rose had asked both her mother and Annie to accompany her, but they had declined, and for a time after Rose’s departure they sat together in perfect silence, while a curious train of thought was passing through the minds of each. Annie’s agitation when Rose read “Pequot” for “paragon” had surprised Mrs. Carleton, while what she had said of the girl and her aunt had awakened a feeling of disquiet and suspicion. Mrs. Carleton was proud of her own and her husband’s family,—proud of her wealth, and proud of her position. Not offensively so, but in that quiet, assured kind of way so natural to the highly bred Bostonian. It was this pride which had prompted her to resort to so extreme measures with the boy Jimmie, when she found how much he was interested in the little Pequot, and when, during Jimmie’s brief stay in Rockland, she, with a mother’s quick intuition, detected in him signs of interest in Annie Graham, her pride again took fright, and she was half glad to have him go from the possible temptation. Something in the nobler part of the woman’s nature told her how wrong the feeling was, while each day some new development of Annie’s gentle Christian character, made the desolate young creature dearer to her. That she was superior to most people in her rank of life Mrs. Carleton knew, and she had more than once wondered how one like her had ever become the wife of a mechanic. She was not thinking of this, however, on the afternoon when she was alone with Annie, while Rose was away on her errand of mercy. She was thinking rather of the suspicion which had just found a lodgment in her mind, and was devising some means of testing its reality. To this end she at last made some casual remark about Rockland and its people, asking if Annie had always lived there. “Only since I was married,” was the reply. And Mrs. Carleton continued, “You seem more like Eastern people than like a New Yorker. Were you born in New England?” “Yes,—in Connecticut,” Annie said. And then Mrs. Carleton made a great blunder by asking next, “Were you born in or near New London? I have been there several times, and may know your family.” At mention of New London Annie’s eyes flashed upon Mrs. Carleton with a startled look, as if she felt that there was a deeper meaning in the questioning to which she was being subjected than appeared on the surface, and her voice trembled a little as she replied, “I was born in Hartford, and lived there till I was eight years old, when my parents both died of cholera in one day, and I went to live with my aunt in New Haven.” “Yes,” Mrs. Carleton answered slowly.