With a dignity oddly in contrast to this stammering confession, which was what it was, she rose to her feet as Mrs. Billing came back to us. The hook-nosed face was somber. Curiosity as to other people's business had for once given place in the old lady's thoughts to meditations that turned inward. I suppose that in some perverse fashion of her own she loved her daughter, and suffered from her unhappiness. There was enough in this room to prove to her how cruelly mere self-seeking can overreach itself and ruin what it tries to build. "Well, what are you talking about?" she snapped, as she approached us. "Hugh Brokenshire, I'll bet a dime." "Fancy!" was the stroke with which the English girl, smiling dimly, endeavored to counter this attack. Mrs. Billing hardly paused as she made her way toward the door. "Don't let her have him," she threw at Lady Cecilia. "He's not good enough for her. She's my kind," she went on, poking at me with her lorgnette. "Needs a man with brains. Come along, Cissie. Don't mind what she says. You grab Hugh the first chance you get. She'll have bigger fish to fry. Do come along. We've had enough of this." Lady Cissie and I shook hands with the over-acted listlessness of two daughters of the Anglo-Saxon race trying to carry off an emotional crisis as if they didn't know what it meant. But after she had gone I thought of her--I thought of her with her Limoges-enamel coloring, her luscious English voice, her English air of race, her dignity, her style, her youth, her naïveté, her combination of all the qualities that make human beings distinguished, because there is nothing else for them to be. I dragged myself to the Venetian mirror and looked into it. With my plain gray frock, my dark complexion, and my simply arranged hair. I was a poor little frump whom not even the one man in five hundred could find attractive. I wondered how Hugh could be such a fool. I asked myself if he could go on being such a fool much longer. And with the thought that he would--and again with the thought that he wouldn't--I surprised myself by bursting into tears. CHAPTER XVII In similar small happenings April passed and we had reached the middle of May. Easter and the opera were over; as the warm weather was coming on people were already leaving town for the country, the seaside or Europe. Personally, I had no plans beyond spending the month of August, which Mr. Grainger informed me I was to have "off," in making a visit to my old home in Halifax. Hugh had ceased to talk of immediate marriage, since he had all he could do to live on what he earned in selling bonds.