"But he can touch Hugh. That's all he needs to know, as far as you're concerned." She asked, in another tone, "What are you answering now?" I told her it was the invitation to Mrs. Allen's dance. "Then tear it up and say I can't go. Say I've a previous engagement. I'd forgotten that they had that odious Mrs. Tracy Allen there." I tore up the sheet slowly, throwing the fragments into the waste-paper basket. "Why is she odious?" "Because she is." She dropped for a second into the tone of the early friendly days in Halifax. "My dear, she was a shop-girl--or worse. I've forgotten what she was, but it was awful, and I don't mean to meet her." I began to write the refusal. "She goes about with very good people, doesn't she?" "She doesn't go about with me, nor with some others I know, I can tell you that. If she did it would queer us." In the hope of drawing out some such repudiation as that which I felt myself, I said, dryly: "Hugh tells me that if I married him I could be as good as she is--by this time next year." I got nothing for my pains. "That wouldn't help you much--not among the people who count." There was white anger underneath my meekness. "But perhaps I could get along with the people who don't count." "Yes, you might--but Hugh wouldn't." She dismissed the subject as one in which she took only a secondary interest to say that old Mrs. Billing was coming to lunch, and that Gladys and I should have to take that repast up-stairs. She was never direct in her denunciations of her father's second marriage. She brought them in by reference and innuendo, like a prisoner who keeps in mind the fact that walls have ears. She gave me to understand, however, that she considered Mrs. Billing a witch out of "Macbeth" or a wicked old vulture--I could take my choice of comparisons--and she hated having her in the house. She wouldn't do it only that, in ways she could hardly understand, Mrs. Billing was the power behind the throne. She didn't loathe her stepmother, she said in effect, so much as she loathed her father's attitude toward her. I have never forgotten the words she used in this connection, dropping her voice and glancing about her, afraid she might be overheard. "It's as if God himself had become the slave of some silly human woman just because she had a pretty face." The sentence not only betrayed the Brokenshire attitude of mind toward J. Howard, but sent a chill down my back. Having finished my notes and addressed them I rose to return to Gladys; but there was still an unanswered question in my mind. I asked it, standing for a minute beside the bed: "Then you don't want me to go away?" She arched her lovely eyebrows. "Go away? What for?" "Because of the danger of my marrying Hugh." She gave a little laugh. "Oh, there's no danger of that." "But there is," I insisted. "He's asked me a number of times to go with him to the nearest clergyman, and settle the question once for all."