"Yes--we talked about it one morning walking home from church," she admitted. "I don't know whether you know now," Alice said, quickly, flushing nervously, "that there wasn't one shred of foundation for that--that crazy suspicion of mine! But I give you my word--and my mother told me!--that it wasn't so. I don't know how I ever came to think of it, or why I thought Mama admitted it. But I've realized," said Alice, nervously, "that it was a terrible injustice to Annie, and as soon as Chris told me that you knew it--and of course he had _no business_ to let it get any further!--I wanted to set it straight. Poor Annie; she would be perfectly frantic if she knew how calmly I was saddling her with a--a terrible past!" said Alice, laughing. "But I have always been too sensitive where the people I love are concerned, and I blundered into this--this outrageous----" "My aunt had told me that it was not so," Norma said, coolly and superbly interrupting the somewhat incoherent story. "If I ever really believed it----!" she added, scornfully. For her heart was hot with rage, and the first impulse was to vent it upon this nearest of the supercilious Melroses. This was all Alice had wanted then, in sending that little overture of friendship: to tell the little nobody that she was nothing to the great family, after all, to prevent her from ever boasting even an illicit relationship! It was for a formal snub, a definite casting-off, that Norma had been brought all the way from the little green-and-white house in New Jersey! Her eyes grew very bright, and her lips very firm, as she and Alice finished the topic, and she told herself that she would never, never enter the house of Liggett again! Alice, this load off her mind, and the family honour secure, became much more friendly, and she and Norma were talking animatedly when Leslie and Annie came unexpectedly in. They had been to a débutante luncheon, and were going to a débutante tea, and meanwhile wanted a few minutes with dear Alice, and the latest news of Mrs. Melrose, who was in Florida. Aunt and niece were magnificently furred and jewelled, magnificently unaware of the existence of little Mrs. Sheridan of East Orange. Norma knew in a second that the social ripples had closed over her head; she was of no further possible significance in the life of either. Leslie was pretty, bored, ill-tempered; Annie her usual stunning and radiantly satisfied self. The conversation speedily left Norma stranded, the chatter of engagements, of scandals, of new names, was all strange to her, and she sat through some ten minutes of it uncomfortably, longing to go, and not quite knowing how to start. She said to herself that she was done with the Melroses; never--never--never again would even their most fervently extended favour win from her so much as a civil acknowledgment!