But Cissy did not take offense, and I had my weekly letter as usual. Perhaps it was a little more staid, a little less "newsy," and her interest in Herr Rohrs not quite so profound. But really I put all that down to the cold and headache of which Cissy complained in a postscript--and, not even there, was there a hint as to the other half of the crooked sixpence! Which is a record for one woman--girl, I mean--writing to another. Hugh John was anything but sentimental, and it was not his habit to take out the relic wrapped in the tissue-paper oftener than the rearrangement of his scanty finances compelled. He would just give his pocket a slap, and if he felt a lump--why, he thought no more about the matter. He was preparing for college, and, knowing no reason why he should be uneasy, he had immersed himself in his books. He had not the smallest idea that the sharkskin purse, empty, lay in Mrs. Nipper Donnan's drawer, or that the two pieces of the crooked sixpence were wrapped together in the same tissue-paper in far-away Paris. XXI ADA WINTER AND "YOUNG MRS. WINTER" While these things were pending, I went one day to the north side of Edam Water to call upon Ada Winter. I had known Ada at school--not in the same class or term, of course, but just because we came from the same place we nodded, if we were not in too great a hurry, when we crossed each other in the playground. It was not much, but I have noticed that you get more fond of school after you have left it a while. Before, it was "the beastly hole," "Treadmill House," and other pretty little innocent names. Immediately after leaving school, however, it became "the dear old place," a little walled Paradise; and we used to go regularly to the station to see the girls who were still there going off "with smiling faces veiling sad hearts," as Hugh John said--and, of course, as I know now, wishing us all at Jericho. At any rate I called upon Ada Winter, and among other things we talked about the choir practice at our church, and I asked Ada why she did not go. You see, she had been with me in the school choir, where, as in most choirs, they put the pretty girls in front. (No, I shan't tell where I sat, not I!) "Why," said Ada, with an inflection which would have been bitter but for its sadness, "why I can't go to choir practice is not because I have lost my voice, as mother tells everybody. But because mother wants to go herself! Some one has got to stay at home." "But Mrs. Winter--but your mother," I began, "she does not----" "I know--I know--you need not repeat it," cried Ada, feeling for her handkerchief in a quick, nervous way she always had. "Mother cannot sing a note, and every one there makes fun of the way she dresses! Oh, don't I know!"