Miss Keggs to all this presented only a fixed smile. A smile belongs much more to the eyes than to the lips. The lips, but not the eyes, can counterfeit a smile. False coin is “uttered” as they say in law; and the lips utter. Not so the eyes. All metal that the mouth issues is to be tested there. The expression in Miss Keggs’s eyes was not at all in consonance with that of her mouth. The expression of her eyes was rather oddly vacant as you may see on the face of a person who is apparently attending to what you are saying but really is listening to another conversation in the same room. “Not listening” as it is called. “An absent look” as they say. Nevertheless she joined dove-tailed response to Rosalie’s words. “To tell you the truth,” said Miss Keggs, speaking very slowly and repeating the preamble. “To tell you the truth I wouldn’t have received your letters if you had written them.” “You wouldn’t? Why not?” “To tell you the truth--” there had been a pause before she first spoke; a pause again before this reply and then again a beginning with this phrase about which there was nothing odd in itself but something odd in the manner of its use by Miss Keggs. “To tell you the truth, I’ve left the school.” “Left the Sultana’s!” Miss Keggs nodded with slow inclinations, like grave bows, of her head. “Whatever for? Keggo, when, why?” And then Rosalie, impelled by some apprehension that suddenly pressed her, put a quick hand on Keggo’s arm and cried sharply, “Keggo! There is something very strange about you. What has happened to you? Something has happened. You can’t keep it from me.” But Keggo could. At that quick gesture of suspicion of Rosalie’s, animation sprung to meet it as a cat, at a sudden start, will leap from profound slumber to a place of safety and to arched defence. Miss Keggs, in their first exchanges, might have been as one drowsily answering questions from a bed. She was suddenly, in her instant casting away of her absent air, as that one flinging away the bedclothes and leaping upright to the floor. What had she been saying? She had been quite lost in something she was thinking of when Rosalie came up. She scarcely had recollected her. She had been very, very ill with “this influenza” and still was only convalescent. Why, how very, very glad she was to see her dear Rosalie again! And how Rosalie had developed! “Why, Rosalie, you are beautiful! You are! And you don’t blush or simper to hear it! Yes, you are beautiful.”