“At last we can talk about it--thank goodness!” And she began. Horace Maclew and Lilla had met the previous autumn, duck-shooting in South Carolina. Lilla was a wonderful shot when she wasn’t ... well, when she was in training ... and Maclew, like most heavy solemn men of his type, who theoretically admire helpless feminine women, had been bowled over by the sight of this bold huntress, who damned up and down the birds she missed, smoked and drank with the men, and in the evening lay back silent, with lids half-dropped over smouldering sullen eyes, and didn’t bore one with sporting chatter or sentimental airs. It had been a revelation, the traditional thunderbolt; only, once back in Baltimore, Maclew had been caught in the usual network of habits and associations; or perhaps other influences had intervened. No doubt, with a man like that, there would be a “settled attachment” in the background. Then Lilla, for a while, was more outrageous than ever, and when he came to New York to see her, dragged him to one of her rowdiest parties, and went away from it in the small hours with another man, leaving Maclew and his super-Rolls to find their way home uncompanioned. After that the suitor had vanished, and it had taken the combined efforts of all the family, and the family’s friends, to draw him back. (“And no one helped us more than Major Fenno,” Nollie added with a grateful sigh.) The name, dropping suddenly into their talk, made Lilla and her wooer and all the other figures in the tale shrivel up like toy balloons. Kate Clephane felt her blood rising again; would she never be able to hear Chris mentioned without this rush of the pulses? “He was so clever and tactful about it,” Nollie was going on. “And he really _believes_ in Lilla, just as I do. Otherwise, of course, he couldn’t have done what he did--when Horace Maclew has been such a friend to him. He believes she’ll keep straight, and that they’ll be awfully happy. I fancy he knows a good deal about women, don’t you?” “About women like Lilla, perhaps.” The words had flashed out before Kate even knew the thought had formed itself. It must have welled up from some depth of bitterness she had long thought dry. Nollie’s eyes looked grieved. “Oh--you don’t like him?” “I haven’t seen him for years,” Kate answered lifelessly. “He admires you so much; he says he used to look up to you so when he was a boy. But I daresay he wasn’t half as interesting then; he says himself he was a sort of intellectual rolling stone, never sure of what he wanted to be or to do, and always hurting and offending people in his perpetual efforts to find himself. That’s how he puts it.” Look up to her when he was a boy! Yes; that’s how he _would_ put it. And the rest too; how often she had heard that old analogy of the rolling stone and its victims!