The holly-leaves were gone now that had been conducive to thought at Christmas in this same room when we heard the two girls count four so often, but Sally could pull an azalea flower to pieces over her cogitations, and did so, instead of tuning up forthwith. Laetitia was preoccupied--couldn't take an interest in other people's fathers, nor her own for that matter. She tuned up, though, and told Sally to look alive. But while Sally looks alive she backs into a conversation of the forenoon, and out of the pending discussion of Sally's paternity. Their two preoccupations pull in opposite directions. "You _will_ remember not to say anything, won't you, Sally dear? Do promise." "Say anything? Oh no; _I_ shan't say anything. I never do say things. What about?" "You know as well as I do, dear--about Julius Bradshaw." "Of course I shan't, Tishy. Except mother; she doesn't count. I say, Tishy!" "Well, dear. Do look alive. I'm all ready." "All right. Don't be in a hurry. I want to know whether you really think my father drank." "Why should I, dear? I never heard anything about him--at least, I never heard anything myself. Mamma heard something. Only I wasn't to repeat it. Besides, it was nothing whatever to do with drink." The moment Laetitia said this, she knew that she had lost her hold on her only resource against cross-examination. When the difficulty of concealing anything is thrown into the same scale with the pleasure of telling it, the featherweights of duty and previous resolutions kick the beam. Then you are sorry when it's too late. Laetitia was, and could see her way to nothing but obeying the direction on her music, which was _attacca_. To her satisfaction, Sally came in promptly in the right place, and a first movement in B sharp went steadily through without a back-lash. There seemed a chance that Sally hadn't caught the last remark, but, alas! it vanished. "What was it, then, if it wasn't drink?" said she, exactly as if there had been no music at all. Laetitia once said of Sally that she was a horribly direct little Turk. She was very often--in this instance certainly. "I suppose it was the usual thing." Twenty-four, of course, knew more than nineteen, and could speak to the point of what was and wasn't usual in matters of this kind. But if Laetitia hoped that vagueness would shake hands with delicacy and that details could be lubricated away, she was reckoning without her Turk. "What _is_ the usual thing?" "Hadn't we better go on to the fugue? I don't care for the next movement, and it's easy----" "Not till you say what you mean by 'the usual thing.'" "Well, dear, I suppose you know what half the divorce-cases are about?" "_Tishy!_" "What, dear?" "There was _no_ divorce!" "How do you know, dear?" "I _should_ have known of it." "How do you know that?"