"Certainly one or two people have commented on your friendship," said Owen thoughtfully, "and I'm bound to say I don't like it myself. To begin with Mrs. Herrick treats her husband abominably; and I should not have thought you would have been attracted by her shallow, futile way of talking." "You forget I'm shallow and futile myself," said Toni with a faint, bitter smile. "The gossips of the neighbourhood have long since decided that I was an ignorant little fool who wasn't fit to be the mistress of Greenriver; and I suppose it's a case of birds of a feather, isn't it?" "Toni!" Owen's voice expressed bewilderment. "What on earth do you mean? Who ever dared to say you weren't fit to be mistress of Greenriver?" "Oh, heaps of people," said Toni recklessly. "You know quite well you were ashamed of me when we first went out to dinner parties here, and I didn't know how to behave--and lately we have been invited nowhere--not even to the Golf Club Ball." Owen bit his lip. In truth the matter of the ball had puzzled him considerably. Although not a golfer, he was on friendly terms with many of the members of the local Club; and since Toni's friends, Mollie and Cynthia Teach, were ardent golfers, it had seemed most probable that Owen and his wife would receive an invitation to the annual ball. The Tobies had indeed gone so far as to assure Toni of her invitation when first the ball was mentioned; and though as the day grew near the two girls grew uneasy when the topic was broached, Toni never dreamed that their avoidance of the subject covered a real and distressing awkwardness. Certainly neither Toni nor Owen imagined that they had been quietly excluded from the list of guests; but such was the astounding fact, as Mollie and Cynthia were guiltily aware. It was largely due to Lady Martin's plain-speaking that this came about. Somehow the real truth about Eva Herrick had leaked out; as such truths do invariably leak out; and Toni's ill-advised friendship with Herrick's wife was easily turned to her disadvantage by so skilful an adversary as Lady Martin. From the first her ladyship had been unable to bring herself to tolerate Toni; and had lost no opportunity of spreading abroad Toni's rash admission as to the nature of her cousin's employment--with the immediate result that in a good many people's eyes Toni herself was looked upon as an unusually fortunate shop-girl raised by a stroke of good luck to a position which she was quite unsuited to adorn. Possibly there was in the case of some of her detractors an element of jealousy in their comments on Owen Rose's wife. There were a good many houses along the river where daughters were at a discount; and to see an unknown and attractive girl like Toni step into the place which many of these girls would have dearly liked to fill was doubtless somewhat galling.