Sometimes she’d be alone but generally there was a man along. There were a lot of them hanging round her, which was natural, seeing she had everything to draw them like a candle drawing moths. They’d come and go from town and now and then stay over Sunday at the Longwood Inn—it’s a swell little place done up in the Colonial style—and you’d see them riding and walking with her, very devoted. At first everybody thought her parents were agreeable to all the attention she was getting. It wasn’t till the Mapleshade servants began to talk too much that we heard the Fowlers, especially the Doctor, didn’t like it. I hadn’t known her long before I began to notice something that interested me. A telephone girl sees so many people and hears such a lot of confidential things on the wire, that she gets to know more than most about what I suppose you’d call human nature. It’s a study that’s always attracted me and in Miss Sylvia’s case there was a double attraction—I was curious about her for myself and I was curious about her because of Jack Reddy. What I noticed was that she was so different with men to what she was with women—affable to both, but it was another kind of affability. I’ve seen considerably many girls trying to throw their harpoons into men and doing it too, but they were in the booby class beside Miss Sylvia. She was what the novelists call a coquette, but she was that dainty and sly about it that I don’t believe any of the victims knew it. It wasn’t what she said, either; more the way she looked and the soft, sweet manner she had, as if she thought more of the chap she was talking to than anybody else in the world. She’d be that way to one in my exchange and the next day I’d see her just the same with another in the drugstore. It made me uneasy. Even if the man you love doesn’t love you, you don’t want to see him fooled. But I said nothing—I’m the close sort—and it wasn’t till I came to be friends with Anne Hennessey that I heard the inside facts about the family at Mapleshade. Anne Hennessey was a Canadian and a fine girl. She was a lady and had a lady’s job—seventy-five a month and her own bathroom—and being the real thing she didn’t put on any airs, but when she liked me made right up to me and we soon were pals. After work hours I’d sometimes go up to her at Mapleshade or she’d come down to me over the Elite. I remember it was in my room one spring evening—me lying on the bed and Anne sitting by the open window—that she began to talk about the Fowlers. She was not one to carry tales, but I could see she had something on her mind and for the first time she loosened up. I was picking over a box of chocolates and I didn’t give her a hint how keen I was to hear, acting like the candies had the best part of my attention. She began by saying the Doctor and Miss Sylvia didn’t get on well. "That’s just like a novel," I answered, "the heroine’s stepfather’s always her natural enemy."