The other offender was Dan’s own stenographer, Hazel Mitchell. Dan, who looked upon the world with a larger vision than did most of the Corners, had a contempt and lack of interest in Lorraine’s “grafters.” Had he loved Lorraine as he had loved Thurley there would have been many a battle on the subject until he had shown Lorraine the broader vision and comprehension. As it was, he was content to let well enough alone, unless he was called upon to entertain the “grafters” and endure their chatter. Hazel Mitchell was a slender, wan-eyed girl—“moon face” was Dan’s considerate name for her. She was, so he said, eternally recombing her hair when he wanted to give some dictation and always feeling whether or not her waist and skirt were properly interlocked, or running off to visit the male clerk in the men’s furnishings or “just slipping” up to Owen Pringle’s shoppe to try on a new hat! Hazel operated her actions on the theory that “pity is akin to love” and if she could make every one sufficiently sorry for her the day was won. This she managed to do with less consideration for the truth and the common sense of her audience than one might have suspected. “Oh, I never listen to her yarns,” Dan told Lorraine, when Lorraine asked if he did not feel sorry for Hazel who had a brutal, drunken father and whose mother with eight children younger than Hazel never had a kind word for the girl, but expected her to come right straight home from work and start tending the babies. “If there was any one else in this town I could hire, I’d do it without hesitation. But if I let her go, Josie Donaldson would want the place or else Cora Spooner, and Hazel is a mild sort of fool. How can she cry all the time and not get granulated lids?” he ended irritably. “She blots her dictation pad for fair.” “She says they have nothing elevating in their home and she craves better things,” repeated little Lorraine. “Oh, yes, she does—she wants a duke to drop out of the clouds and swoop her up and a lot she cares if her whole family starve to death. I don’t blame her father for his morning’s morning, if he has to listen to her, and she spends all her money on herself, turning it right into the store for nonsense. Her spare time she spends in Owen Pringle’s boudoir,” Dan’s eyes twinkled, “learning how to be one of the idle rich on eight per! Oh, ’Raine, ask old Ali Baba up for supper—I want to know how it feels to have somebody with sense as a guest.” “But it’s a real joy for the girls to come here—” Here Dan betrayed more insight into Lorraine’s life than she fancied he possessed. “It was never a joy for them to come and see you when you lived at the parsonage, scrubbing and cooking and mending! I never saw Josie Donaldson rolling up her sleeves to give you a lift or Hazel Mitchell hanging about until she was asked inside. It was no joy then. They beat it the other way when they saw you coming—”