"Am I to be invited?" asked Adelaide Maud simply. "Mrs. and Miss Dudgeon," said Elma in a hollow voice. "Do you think Mrs. Dudgeon will come?" she asked in a melancholy manner. "Not if Mr. Leighton looks like that," said Adelaide Maud. She turned in a pettish manner away from him and gazed at Elma. Elma burst out laughing. "Oh, Cuthbert, I do think you are horrid to Adelaide Maud." Adelaide Maud sat up again looking perfectly delighted. "Now there," she said, "I have been waiting for years for some one to say that about Mr. Leighton. Thank you so much, dear. It’s so perfectly true. For years I have been amiable and for years he has been--a----" "A brute," said Elma placidly. "Yes," said Adelaide Maud. "And I’ve got to go on pretending to be a girl of spirit with a mamma who won’t understand the situation, and--and--I get no encouragement at all. It’s a horrid world," said Adelaide Maud. Cuthbert rose from the easy chair, with a look in his eyes which Elma had never seen. "All I can say is," he pretended to be speaking jocularly, "will the lady who has just spoken undertake to repeat these words, in private--in----" "No, she won’t," said Adelaide Maud in a whisper. Elma sat shaking in every limb. The one thought that passed through her mind was that if she didn’t clear out, Cuthbert might kiss Adelaide Maud, and that would be awful. She crawled out of the room somehow or other. What the others were thinking of her she did not know. She wanted to reach something outside the door, and sank on a chair there. Oh, the selfishness of lovers! Adelaide Maud and Cuthbert were "making it up" while she sat shaking with her face in her hands in the long corridor. Mrs. Leighton found her there some little time afterwards. "Sh! mummy. Speak in a whisper, please." "Well, I never. Who is ill now, I should like to know?" "Adelaide Maud and Cuthbert." She pulled her mother’s head down to her and whispered in her ear. "I didn’t know it was coming, they were so cross with one another. And then I knew it was. And I just slipped out. And I’m shaking so that I’m afraid to get off this chair. I should never be able to get engaged myself--it’s so--en--enervating." "Well, I never," said Mrs. Leighton; "well, I never. Turned you out of your own room, my pet. Just like those Dudgeons." "Oh, mummy, it’s lovely. I don’t mind. It’s just being ill that made me shake. Aren’t you glad it’s Adelaide Maud?" "Well--it never was anybody else, was it?" asked Mrs. Leighton blandly. "Oh, mummy! You knew!" Elma’s whispers became most accusing. Mrs. Leighton might have been as dense as possible in regard to her daughters, but Cuthbert’s heart had always lain bare. "Know?" asked she. "What do you think made Adelaide Maud run after you the way she did?" "Oh, mummy. It wasn’t only because of Cuthbert, was it?" "Well, I sometimes thought it was," she said with a smile at her lips. She looked at the shut door.