"It was a little indiscreet of me," she allowed. "But I was never so astounded in my life. And the girl's mother actually defends her. She talks about `her own flesh and blood.' ... As though that makes any difference! I knew you would be shocked. It's such a scandal in the place. And to come back... where every one knows!" "She can't stay," said Miss Agatha decidedly; and her thin lips compressed themselves tightly, locking themselves upon the sentence as it passed them. She pushed the work on the table aside and looked fixedly at the vicar's wife. "We can't tolerate such a scandal in Wortheton. We have to think of the people at the Works. That kind of thing... it... We must set our faces against it." "Of course," Mrs North agreed doubtfully. "That's why I came to you." Every one came to Miss Agatha when an unpleasant situation had to be faced: she faced it so resolutely, with the inflexibility of justice untempered with mercy. Sin was sin. There were no intermediate shades between black and white. Sin had to be uprooted. The moral prestige of Wortheton demanded that all which was "not nice" must be eliminated from its community. And in a dingy room in a dingy little house in a dingier side street, a girl with a beautiful face was thinking in her passionate discontent how good it was to be a bird--a small feathered thing in a nest among the branches of a fine old tree--anything rather than a human being. CHAPTER THREE. Prudence leaned with her arms on the sill of her bedroom window, looking out on the night-shadowed garden and the white line of the road beyond its shrub-hidden walls. This was the best hour in the twenty-four--the hour when she could be alone; for the bedroom, which once had been a nursery, was all her own. The other Miss Graynors, with the exception of Agatha, shared rooms; but the little half-sister who had occupied the nursery alone for so many years was permitted to regard this haven as still hers: no one sought to dispossess her, though the room was large and had a south aspect, while Miss Agatha's room faced north. But Miss Agatha was not averse from a northern aspect; and the room had the advantage of commanding a view of the servants' quarters, so that she was enabled to watch the coming in and, which was still more important, the going forth of these dependants, whose seemly conduct she made her particular care.