“I am Anna Miller. I have wanted awfully to get acquainted with you, though truly I didn’t mean to break in the way I did.” The dark girl smiled vaguely and rose slowly from the wall. Anna sprang up also. “You mind--waiting alone?” the stranger asked hesitatingly. “I’m not afraid, only I don’t seem to feel like facing my thoughts at this moment. I guess I’ll hike along if you’re leaving me.” As she breathed a deep sigh, the dark girl looked at her in troubled fashion. “Come up to our cottage and have a cup of tea first,” she asked in a constrained manner. Anna said afterwards to Miss Penny that if she had talked Latin she would have used the form of interrogation that expects the answer no. “I’d like to, first rate, if it wouldn’t be too much bother for you,” she said frankly. And when the other assured her that it would be no trouble, she put her hand on her arm and they went up the lane together. The outer door led straight into the living-room. As they entered, a tall, handsome, dark-eyed woman with a proud, forbidding countenance rose from a chair and confronted them. “Mother, this is Miss Miller,” the girl said deprecatingly. “She doesn’t feel well--she’s faint and I want to make her a cup of tea.” “Not Miss Miller,--Anna, please. No one calls me anything else,” the girl asked in her sweet young voice. But the woman, who bowed stiffly without extending her hand, asked Miss Miller stiffly to be seated. Anna dropped limply into a chair. The other girl went out of the room. “I--I didn’t catch your name,” murmured Anna. “Lorraine,” said the woman coldly and yet with a certain fierce warmth. “Somehow that name sounds very familiar to me,” Anna observed, only to perceive by the woman’s face that she had made an extremely mal àpropos remark. “I suppose it’s the city--or province in France I am thinking of,” she added lamely. “Quite likely,” returned Mrs. Lorraine frigidly, and taking up a piece of embroidery began sternly to set fine stitches in it. Anna glanced at her timidly. “How pretty your fancy-work is,” she remarked, politely deprecatory. She told Miss Penny afterwards that she wondered the stuff weren’t all eyelet-holes, for Mrs. Lorraine’s eyes, black as they were, reminded her of burning coals. And she declared that hereafter she would believe in the tamarisk or basilisk or whatever the bird was whose gaze turned one to stone. “It could hardly be called fancy-work,” Mrs. Lorraine rejoined, and her voice was the more cutting in that it was naturally good and had the modulations of one who has lived among educated people in society. “I make my living and that of my daughter--or try to--doing this work.”