"What did you put me down for then when you found out?" "We didn’t get a line on it all at once. That was later. Mrs. Mountney told Lulu, and Dick Stroud told me, and so—" "Did you all believe what you heard?" "It was pretty hard not to, wasn’t it? after the queer things you’d been doing. There was just one person who stuck it out that it wasn’t true; and that was little Milly. She didn’t say much to the family; but to me she declared that if all the armies in France were to swear to it, she’d still know there was some mistake. She’s another one I can’t make out." "What can’t you make out about her?" "Whether she’s got a heart in her body, or only a hard-boiled egg." "Oh, I fancy she has a heart all right." "I used to fancy the same thing, or rather I took it for granted; but ever since— Well, she just stumps me." She reverted to her errand in Boston and what came of it. "It wasn’t till I began to hear of what was going on there that it seemed to me—" the veil of tears to which her eyes were liable descended like a distant mist—"that it seemed to me a darned shame." "What seemed to you a darned shame in particular?" "Well, first that Dick Stroud should be pulling the wool over any other woman’s eyes, especially a rich one, and then that he should be upsettin’ your apple-cart when you’d had so much trouble already. After that it all came easy." "What came easy?" "Getting to know Mrs. Harrowby, and all the rest of it. The first once or twice I didn’t see how to bring in Dick Stroud’s name without seeming to do it on purpose; but after I met you in the up-stairs hall, why it was just natural. Say, you copped a peach when you got married; do you know it?" "Why do you say that?" "Because I’ve got eyes in my head; and, say, she’s the one I saw you with that time I told you about, ever so long ago, and it must have been in New York. I suppose some guy had taken me to a swell restaurant to blow me in for a dinner; but anyhow she was the one. The minute I saw her back I knew there were not two such _speaking_ backs in the world. As for me modeling myself on her, well, an old hour-glass pair of stays might as well try to be Clotilde’s Number Three Coar Pearl. And, say, she’s some sport, isn’t she? When I told her more about Dick Stroud and me, after you’d gone away that afternoon, she never turned a hair. Mrs. Mountney says she was going to marry him if you hadn’t turned up, and even now he’s hoping to marry her; but when I let her have the whole bunch of truth, she took it like a rag doll will take a pin-prick. Never moved a muscle, or showed that it wasn’t just my story, and not a bit her own. Of course I took my cue from that—it was my line all along—and was just the poor working-girl telling her life history to a sympathetic lady, just as they hand it out in books; but she carried the thing off something swell. In fact, she made me more than half think—" "What?" I questioned, when she held her idea suspended there.