"It is immaterial. The point is, I did not discharge the girl. She left me of her own accord. I should have been glad to have kept her. She is sober, clean, honest, and industrious. As good a servant as I should wish to have." I pretended to look at a little memorandum book which I took from my purse. "Your name is Tennant--Mrs. Tennant?" She nodded her head, still faintly smiling. "My name is Tennant." "I perceive that the names are similar; but I take it that, in spite of the similarity, you are in no way connected with the Three Bridges murderer?" The shot sped straight home. She went red all over, then white as a sheet. Her lips trembled. I thought for a moment that she was going to cry. But she didn't. "I don't know what it matters to you or how it concerns a servant's character; but I am the wife of the Mr. Thomas Tennant who is being wrongfully accused of murder, but who is wholly innocent of any crime." Then, with what was very like a hysterical outburst, she added, "He is the dearest and the best husband in the world." "Dear me!" I rose from my seat. I went to the door. "I had no notion that you were in any way connected with that dreadful creature, or I certainly should not have troubled you. To think that you can be the wife of such a man! Of course it is altogether out of the question that I could knowingly engage a servant who had lived in such a house as this!" Without waiting for her to summon a servant to escort me to the door, I showed myself out into the street. I had given her one. But now that I had done it I was not by any means proud of the gift I had bestowed. Indeed, when I got indoors I could have bit and slapped and scratched and pinched myself--and worse. Women are cats. There is no doubt of it. Especially to each other! I know it, to my sorrow, of my own experience. If there was one thing on which I had always prided myself, it was that--at any rate, in that respect, I was not like other women. Whatever else I was, I was not a cat. And now I had been the cat of all the cats! And all because of that stupid paragraph in that stupid paper. When I thought of that pale-faced woman, with her sweet, true mouth, and brown eyes, and of all the trouble she had to bear, and of how I had gone out of my way to add to the bitterness of it all, and to rub it in, I could have banged my head against the wall. But there! the thing was done. And when a thing is done--especially a thing like that--it is not the least use being sorry. One may as well pretend that one is glad. And, after all, the engagement was announced. And why did they announce it, if they did not want to drive me into a rage?