The Colonel heard it across the room, and glancing at them felt annoyed that June should look so suddenly flushed and radiant. Evidently she and Jerry Barclay, in the ten days he had spent at Foleys, had become very good friends. An hour later the Misses Allen were standing at the top of the steps that led from the porch to the street. Guests were departing in all directions, and the lanterns of carriages were sending tubes of opaque, yellow light through the fog. The Colonel had gone in quest of theirs, cautioning his charges to wait in the shelter of the porch for him. Here they stood, close-wrapped against the damp, and peering into the churning white currents. Just below them two men, the collars of their coats up, paused to light their cigars. One accomplished the feat without difficulty; the other stood with his hand curved round the match, which many times flamed and went out. Suddenly June heard his companion say between puffs, “Queer, Mrs. Newbury being here!” “Oh, I don’t know,” said the other, drawing a new match from his pocket, “Mrs. Davenport knew the Romero girls long before they were married. They were friends of Annie Davenport’s. Nobody’d ever breathed a word against either of them then. She wouldn’t throw Lupé down on a rumored scandal. I don’t see how she could.” “Lots of people have. And you call it a ‘rumored scandal’ all you want; everybody believes it. She owns him body and soul.” The other man had at last induced the tip of his cigar to catch. He threw back his head and drew a few quick inspirations. “That’s the story. But a woman like Mrs. Davenport is not going to damn her daughter’s friend on hearsay. Women have got a creed of their own; they believe what they want to and they disbelieve what they want to. She wants to believe that the affair’s purely platonic, and she does it.” “But Barclay! To hang round her that way in public--what a fool!” “Oh, Barclay!”--a shrug went with the words--“he does what he’s told!” The man turned as he spoke and saw the two girls above him on the step. He threw a low-toned phrase at his companion, and without more words they started out and were absorbed in the darkness. Almost simultaneously a carriage rattled up and the Colonel’s voice bade June and Rosamund descend. A half-hour later, as they were mounting the stairs to their rooms, June said suddenly, “Did you hear what those men were saying on the steps as we stood there waiting?” They had both heard the entire conversation, and though they did not understand the true purport of the ambiguous phrases, they realized that they contained a veiled censure of Mrs. Newbury and Jerry Barclay. Their secluded bringing up in an impoverished home where the coarseness of the world never entered had kept them ignorant of the winked-at sins of society. Yet the crude frankness of mining camps had paraded before their eyes many things that girls brought up in the respectable areas of large cities never see.