largely made up of a gloomy demand for sympathy and a stately evasion of it. Mrs. Forrester now poured her out a second cup of tea, answering, soothingly, "Yes, she is capricious. But what do you expect, my dear Eleanor? She is a force of nature, above our little solidarities and laws. What do you expect? When one worships a force of nature, _il faut subir son sort_." It was kind of Mrs. Forrester to include herself in these submissions. "I had really built all my summer about the plans that we had made," Miss Scrotton said. "Mercedes was to have come back with me, I was to have stopped in Cornwall for Karen's marriage and after my month here in London I was to have joined her at Les Solitudes for August. Now August is empty and I had refused more than one very pleasant invitation in order to go to Mercedes. She isn't coming back for another three months." "You didn't care to go with the Aspreys to the Adirondacks?" "How could I go, dear Mrs. Forrester, when I was full of engagements here in London for July? And, moreover, they didn't ask me. It is rather curious when one comes to think of it. I brought the Aspreys and Mercedes together, I gave her to them, one may say, but, I am afraid I must own it, they seized her and looked upon me as a useful rung in the ladder that reached her. It has been a disillusionizing experience, I can't deny it; but _passons_ for the Aspreys and their kind. The fact is," said Miss Scrotton, dropping her voice a little, "the real fact is, dear Mrs. Forrester, that the Aspreys aren't responsible. It wasn't for them she'd have stayed, and I think they must realize it. No, it is all Claude Drew. He is at the bottom of everything that I feel as strange and altered in Mercedes. He has an unholy influence over her, oh, yes, I mean it, Mrs. Forrester. I have never seen Mercedes so swayed before." "Swayed?" Mrs. Forrester questioned. "Oh, but yes, indeed. He managed the whole thing--and when I think that he would in all probability never have seen the Aspreys if it had not been for me!--Mercedes had him asked there, you know; they are very, but very, very fashionable people, they know everybody worth knowing all over the world. I needn't tell you that, of course. But it was all arranged, he and Mercedes, and Lady Rose and the Marquis de Hautefeuille, and a young American couple--with the Aspreys in the background as universal providers--it made a little group where I was plainly _de trop_. Mr. Drew planned everything with her. She is to have her piano and he is to write a book under her aegis. And they are to live in the pinewoods with the most elaborate simplicity. However, I am sure the Adirondacks will soon bore her." "And how soon will Mr. Drew bore her?" asked Mrs. Forrester, who had listened to these rather pitiful revelations with, now and then, a slight elevation of her intelligent eyebrows.