“But, my dear,” she said, “she told me that she first took to drinking because her husband was such a terrible drunkard and ill-used her so cruelly. She said to me, ‘Ah, m’m, you single ladies don’t know what misery is, and mustn’t be hard on them that do!’ Then she said she had kept straight for years because she lived with miserly old folks, who never had liquor in their house, and who lived two miles from any licensed premises. She said she thought she’d got such a mastery over herself that she might venture to take “a little support” through her Christmas cooking, but that the old craving came and re-enslaved her before she was aware.” The two friends’ eyes met, and they looked at each other with the deprecatory, half-alarmed, half-shamed expression which always comes on honest faces at any new discovery of human duplicity. “What is true? What is false?” wailed Lucy. “It seems to me that she adapted her stories to what she thought would best reach and touch you or me. True, sometimes the same story sounds differently when differently told and differently repeated. But I cannot see how these two versions can have the same original. This awful falseness, Miss Latimer, is even worse than the drunkenness.” “My dear,” said the old lady, “it is the moral quagmire from which the drunkenness springs, and, therefore, is ‘worse’ just as a quagmire is ‘worse’ than any coarse weed which springs from it—being bound to bear such weeds, if not of one type, then of another.” “It seems to me as if she was all dramatic impersonation,” Lucy observed; “and still one cannot help loving and yearning over the cheerful-faced working-woman seated knitting before her kitchen fire with her dead husband’s lover-gift of a Bible lying on the dresser behind her.” Miss Latimer looked at Lucy. “Just now,” she said, “I found that Bible; it was in the dustpan, with a good many leaves roughly torn out.” “She must have done that while she was—not herself,” said Lucy. “No,” Miss Latimer persisted, “it was lying on the dresser all right this morning long after she knew perfectly well what she was doing. It must have been done about noon to-day.” “But why should she do that?” urged Lucy. “Whatever is amiss with her now, and whatever may be the truth of her history, why should she suddenly and wantonly destroy something which she has evidently cherished for so many years?” Miss Latimer shook her head. “My dear,” she answered, “I begin to suspect that this poor Bible may have been but one of the ‘properties’ belonging to what you aptly call her ‘dramatic impersonation’ of the respectable, faithful widow. I would not be at all surprised if she picked it up at a second-hand bookstall, and matched her story to its names and dates. Don’t think me cynical. As a governess, I have lived in many houses, and have come across some strange adventurers. How do we know that her name was ever Jessie Milne, or that she was really a Mrs. Morison?”