It had to come out. The dam burst suddenly. There was now no means of holding it back. Meg Linwood's private sense of injustice was increased a thousandfold by the purring sympathy of Young Mrs. Winter. No, indeed, she would not sit down under it. She was not now a "slavey" to be treated like that. She had had quite enough! And so on and so on. Young Mrs. Winter incautiously suggested an appeal to Mrs. Nipper's husband, and so very nearly cut off the whole book of the revelation in mid-gush. "Oh, no!" cried Mrs. Nipper, "above all things Nipper must know nothing about it! _He_ would not understand!" Young Mrs. Winter threw up her hands with a little gesture of despair, as much as to say, "I do not quite see, in that case, what is to be done in the matter!" Then came the dread secret. "I have paid them off myself. But oh--it is a great secret! Nipper would never forgive me--he thinks so much of that Hugh John Picton Smith!" "Tell me all about it," purred Young Mrs. Winter. "You know I never speak again of things which have been told me in confidence!" And, indeed, there was more of truth in the statement than the lady herself was aware of. For there were but few people in Edam so foolish as to tell Young Mrs. Winter even what their chickens had had for dinner! "Oh, they shall not mock at me any more," said Mrs. Nipper, half crying with anger, half trembling at her own temerity. The Meg Linwood of the back kitchen had not got over her former wholesome dread of correction. And in her secret heart she always feared (and perhaps also a little hoped) that one day Nipper, put out of patience by her tricks, would snatch up a stick and give her the same sort of moral lesson by which the late Mr. Linwood had recalled his family to a sense of their duty. "They shall not mock at me--yes, I know they do--because I was once a servant." (How little she knew either Hugh John or Elizabeth, if the accusation were made seriously!) "But I have shown them that they cannot tamper with me!" "But how--tell me how you did it?" said Young Mrs. Winter, sinking her voice to a whisper. "I found a letter," said Meg in a solemn whisper, and putting her mouth close to the ear of her listener, "yes, a letter--from that Carter girl in Paris to Hugh John Picton Smith." "Never!" cried Young Mrs. Winter, clasping her hands together in a kind of ecstasy. Then, fearing she had gone too far, she said, "I should like to see it, but I suppose you sent it back immediately." "I did nothing of the kind," Meg Linwood giggled. "I would not be so soft, though I have only been a servant--a common slavey, washing pans in the scullery, while my lady, all dressed up fine, sold candy in the front shop, and talked to _that Hugh John_!" Thus innocently did poor Meg Linwood lay bare to the experienced eyes of Young Mrs. Winter the secret springs of her jealousy. "It _is_ a shame," murmured that lady sympathetically but vaguely.