I learned that Mrs. Rossiter's mother had been a Miss Brew, and that the Brews were a great family in Boston. She was the mother of all Mr. Brokenshire's children. By looks and hints and sighs I gathered from Mrs. Rossiter that her father's second marriage had been a trial to his family. Not that there had been any social descent. On the contrary, the present Mrs. Brokenshire had been Editha Billing, of Philadelphia, and there could be nothing better than that. It was a question of fitness, of necessity, of age. "There was no need for him to marry again at all," Mrs. Rossiter complained. "If she'd only been a middle-aged woman," she said to me later, "we might not have felt. . . . But she's younger than Mildred and only a year or two older than I am." "Oh yes," was another remark, "she's pretty; very pretty . . . but I often--wonder." She described her brothers and her sister by degrees. One day she told me about Mildred, another about Jack, so coming toward her point. Mildred was the eldest of the family, a great invalid. She had been thrown from her horse years before while hunting in England, and had injured her spine. Jack had just gone into business with his father, and had married Pauline Gray, of Baltimore. Though she didn't say it in so many words I judged that it was not a happy marriage in the highest sense--that Jack was somewhat light of love, while Pauline "went her own way" to a degree that made her talked about. It was not till the day before her departure for New York that Mrs. Rossiter mentioned her younger brother, Hugh. I was helping her to pack--that is, I was helping the maid while Mrs. Rossiter directed. Just at that minute, however, she was standing up, shaking out the folds of an evening dress. She seemed to peep at me round its garnishings as she said, apropos of nothing: "There's my brother Hugh. He's the youngest of us all--just twenty-six. He has no occupation as yet--he's just studying languages and things. My father wants him to go into diplomacy." As I caught her eye there was a smile in it, but a special kind of smile. It was the smile to go with the sensible, kindly, coaxing inflection with which she said, "You'll leave him alone, won't you?" I took the dress out of her hand to carry it to the maid in the next room. "Leave him alone--how?" She flushed to a lovely pink. "Oh, you know what I mean. I don't have to explain." "You mean that in my position in the household it will be for me to--to keep out of his way?" "It's you who put it like that, dear Miss Adare--" "But it's the way you want me to put it?" "Well, if I admit that it is?" "Then I don't think I care for the place." "What?" I stated my position more simply. "If I'm to have nothing to do with your brother, Mrs. Rossiter, I don't want to go." In the audacity of this response she saw something that amused her, for, snatching the dress from my hand, she ran with it into the next room, laughing.