“Nearly sixteen, please; I’ve told Dante that, and we may as well stick to it. It’s bad enough to have to confess that I’m old enough to have a daughter nearly sixteen, without adding two years to it, for the sake of truth. What in the world has made you grow like this? Of course, I know that your father was tall, but if I had thought that you were as big and as old-looking as you are, I don’t believe I should had have courage enough to send to that Skimmers woman for you--although I don’t know; it’s worth something to have a dig at your aunt! What are you staring at me like this for? For pity’s sake, sit down. Why didn’t you get a new dress? I sent money for you to do so. But perhaps the Skimmers woman didn’t give it to you? Did she? Why don’t you answer? I hate people who stare and say nothing. Sit down and talk to me, for goodness’ sake. I haven’t much time to waste with you, anyway; I’ve got to be off to the theater in a few minutes. I’m opening the new opera house to-night, you know--or, perhaps, you don’t know! But the town is well billed, and if you have any eyes at all you must have seen my name on the boardings.” Dora drew back with a sudden influx of memory and with a shuddering sense of repulsion. “Oh, you don’t mean--you can’t mean that you--you are that woman? And that you are my mother as well?” “Why can’t I mean it? Look here! that Skimmers woman hasn’t raised you like some Puritanical old granny, has she? I’m going to put you on the stage, you know, and have a ‘go’ at your spiteful aunt, in that way. She always treated her brother and me very shabbily. I don’t suppose you ever heard much about your father? Well, he was the unfortunate stepbrother to the richest woman in this part of the country: Mrs. Charles Bonair. He’s dead, by the way, so you won’t be worried by him. Although I wrote her, she wouldn’t give a farthing to me. Stingy old cat! I told her about you--oh, make no mistake about that--and I’ll make her pay dear for what she has tried to do against me in this town. She would not let sleeping dogs lie, and now that she has waked ’em up, she’ll have to pay the price for it, if I know myself.” Something that was like the pressure of a strong hand gripped Dora’s throat. She did not speak; she could not--all strength, mental as well as physical, seemed somehow to have died within her, and, in a sort of collapse, she sank down on the edge of a convenient seat, and stared dumbly at the shining figure before her; a sense of shuddering repulsion biting into her soul and mirroring itself, in spite of her, in her fixed eyes. For, somehow, this woman, her newly found mother, reminded her of a snake curled up in rose leaves.