Did Miss Susan know if Dr. Lavendar were dependent upon his salary, or did he have an independent income? How old was he? How much did she suppose Joseph Lavendar was worth? "I'm sure I don't know!" said Miss Susan loudly.

After that Mrs. Pendleton was silent, and sighed once or twice; then, with an effort to change the subject, she began to talk about her works.

"I mean to give a copy of the Thoughts to Philip Shore's little girl." Miss Susan opened her eyes at the sound of Philip's name.

"Neglected? Molly?" said Miss Susan hotly. "She has the best father in the world, and — and her mother is very fond of her, and "

"Exactly," Mrs. Pendleton broke in, nodding her head; "but it's hard on a child to be brought up by a father and mother who are not united."

"Oh, indeed, I think you must allow that I know them best," Susan Carr said stiffly. "Mr. and Mrs. Shore are both very reserved people, but but they are devoted to Molly," she ended

lamely. She felt as though she wanted to shake Mrs. Pendleton. "It serves me right for promising to go to Mercer with her!" she thought, and looked at the floor so forbiddingly that conversation flagged. She would not look up until they entered Mercer; and when she did, as the stage stopped, it was to see Joseph Lavendar, his face beaming with a friendly smile that turned the corners of his blue eyes into a network of wrinkles.

"My dear Miss Susan, pray take my hand!" he begged, pulling open the stage door, and letting the hinged steps. drop with a clatter. His happiness was apparent in his

voice. very Susan Carr had not a word to say. She got out, and watched him offer Mrs. Pendleton the same courtesy; she felt rigid, and when she tried to smile she had that consciousness of the stiffness of the muscles about her lips that most of us know in those moments when we try to assume enjoyment when we have it not. She flashed a stern and suspicious glance at the little widow cowering by her side, who whispered, "Oh, I hope it was all right? I knew it would give the poor man pleasure; though nothing can come of it, I'm afraid."

"Of course nothing can come of it," Miss Susan replied, so loudly that Mrs. Pendleton shrank, and said, "Sh-h-h!" "But it makes no difference to me. I'm going to make a call. You can go to the shops with Mr. Lavendar."

"Oh, won't that be too marked?" remonstrated Mrs. Pendleton, under her breath. "And consider my errand, too! Oh, that is quite marked."

"I wish it to be marked," said Susan Carr dryly. "I'll leave Mrs. Pendleton to you, Joseph," she said maliciously, turning to the nervous and happy escort. "You can take her to White's and Eaton's, they are the best shops; and I'll meet you at one or the other of them before we go to the hotel for dinner. We'd better have dinner at half past two, I think."

And then she tramped off, with the heavy, swinging step that comes only from having walked between the furrows of new-ploughed fields.

"Of course she told him I was coming!" she said to herself, angry at Mrs. Pendleton's meddling and Joseph's persistence; but with her anger was a certain pride in being so ardently sought.

When she had made her call, she tried to find some interest and pleasure in her shopping; but her heart was hot at the memory of Mrs. Pendleton's perfidy, and heavy with the thought of Joseph Lavendar's disappointment. Nor did she feel more cheerful when, across the street, she caught sight of the two culprits talking so earnestly that they did not see her. Indeed, she even experienced that unreasonable resentment which comes to the best of women when they see a rejected lover consoling himself.

Yet that did not prevent her, when they met at dinner at the hotel, from putting Mrs. Pendleton between herself and Joseph; and when, later, grudgingly enough, she went with them to make some further purchases, from using Mrs. Pendleton as a protector, and placing her in the middle as they walked down the street.

But her conscience reproached her for her severity to them both, and when the stage started she tried to apologize to Mrs. Pendleton for her neglect. "I'm afraid I seemed a little ungracious, but I really had to go and see some people; and I knew Mr. Lavendar would be as good a guide as I."

Mrs. Pendleton shook her head hopelessly. "Oh, I never supposed you were not going to be with me, or I should n't have let him meet me," she said.

But Miss Carr would not pursue the subject; she did not want to talk about Mr. Joseph. She said she must put down her accounts. Yet even while she was adding up her columns of figures, and counting out everybody's change,

she was wretched at the thought of her unkindness to her too devoted lover. Indeed, when she got home, and sat down to her solitary supper table, and heard Ellen scolding her for looking tired, she was almost ready to cry, to think how she had hurt his feelings.

She did not follow Ellen's report of the day's happenings very closely: Miss Lyssie Drayton had gone to the upper village on an errand; Ellen believed that the child would work herself to death over those shiftless people in the upper village. Mrs. Dove had had a whole hind quarter of lamb cooked for Mr. Tommy's dinner; Ellen did n't see how ever cold meat was used up in that house, they had so many joints. "We don't cook no whole hind quarters,” Ellen said; "but we believe willful waste is woeful want." Mr. Philip went away on the afternoon stage; did Miss Susan know he was going? And then Ellen stopped, and coughed a little, and said there was a tablecloth in last week's wash that needed darning. "He ain't looking real good, Miss Susan?"

Miss Carr came out of her remorse with a start. "Oh, I think he's pretty well," she said.

"Well, Mr. Philip was never what you'd call pious," Ellen commented, shaking her head, "so I'm sure I'd like to see him comfortable in this world; but Mrs. Shore's Rosa was in to-day, and well, I don't know! she says they had words last night. Poor Mr. Philip! Well, he's gone; and Rosa says that he won't be in no hurry to come back. Dear me, I don't know how it will end."

Miss Susan's heart was in her throat, yet she waited for Ellen to finish before telling her, sharply, that she did not know what she was talking about, and that Mr. Philip was very well; and why should n't he go away on business? Miss Carr had thought that Ellen had more sense; she thought she was crazy! and she might go and get some hot tea. "This is cold

as a stone," said Miss Susan; "and you are very foolish, Ellen."

"So people are beginning to see it!" she said to herself, with a groan, as Ellen disappeared with the teapot. But Miss Carr did not realize that this was not the "beginning" of the seeing which she deplored. If she had only known it, Ellen had "seen it " long before she had; and so had Esther and Betsey, and half a dozen other Esthers and Betseys. It was only the little thrill of excitement caused by Mr. Shore's abrupt departure which made their knowledge come to the surface.

his kitchen, was that Philip had taken the stage the next afternoon and gone

to town.

"When are you going away?" Cecil had said to her husband, suddenly, at dinner, after John had left the room. "Or shall we leave you here? I am going abroad next month with Molly, and I want to close the house."

"Mamma, is Eric going?" Molly clamored.

"Polly, run upstairs and bring me a box of cigars that is on the table in my room," Philip said, his face pale, his fingers tightening upon the stem of his

And then the cook bet John a larded sweetbread against a handkerchief (“A good hemstitched one; none o' yer cotton ones, now, mind!") that Mr. Shore would sulk for a week before he would come back. And it was this speculation, shared with Old Chester domestics, which caused Ellen's overflow of gossip, and made Miss Susan say that people were "beginning to see it."

We rarely realize how astoundingly complete is our servants' knowledge of us and of our friends. Our weaknesses belong to them, our errors and our misfortunes; we are to them what the theatre and the latest novel, nay, what other people's scandals are to us.

And though poor Susan Carr shrank from believing it, it was just about this time that all Old Chester, through the lowly medium of the Shores' servants, began to know how bad, how very bad things were up in the big house on the hill.

XXI.

There had, indeed, as Miss Susan's Ellen hinted, been "words" between Mr. and Mrs. Shore; and the result, which had so surprised and interested

Cecil cut a peach, smiling. "I'm not sure that it is proper for us to be alone. Do you think Mrs. Drayton would chaperon me, if I asked her? Oh, arrange, of course, about the money you will want ; you must n't deprive your art student of his income."

"This is not decent, before the child!" he said passionately.

"Father," Molly called from the first landing, running her hand back and forth across the balusters to make believe that she was playing on a harp, "there is n't any box of cigars here. Father, may I take some cologne out of your green bottle?"

"Yes. Look in my dressing-room for the cigars," Philip called back.

Cecil put her peach down; she leaned forward, her eyes narrowing like a tiger's.

"Very well, then, you understand: I take Molly with me. Listen! If you try to divide her time,' I 'll carry it through every court in the land, and I'll tell everything! I don't care! I'm going to leave America, so I don't mind the scandal. Besides, people will think you are mad; 'not a fit guardian,' you know."

"Father," Molly said cheerfully, coming downstairs one foot at a time, with

the box of cigars in her arms, 66 I put some cologne on your cigars to make them smell sweet."

It was like a keen edge laid against some tense chord. Philip's face, set with anger, suddenly quivered; then his eyes blurred. But Cecil rose, with a passionate exclamation.

Molly, leaning against her father, was pulling out the cologne -soaked cigars with all the pride of the benefactor.

"Just smell 'em! Oh, father, may Eric go on the ship?"

"Do you want Eric to go, darling?" Cecil said. "Then come here to mamma, and she 'll tell you all about it."

And Molly joyously deserted her father, and ran to hang on her mother's hand and chatter about her dog.

Later, when the child had gone to bed, Philip came into the parlor, where his wife was reading. "I am going to town to-morrow - he began.

she did not want to ask Lyssie. So the letter stood on her writing-desk for a day or two; stood there, in fact, after Philip had consulted his lawyer, and had learned that, as he had supposed, if the question of the disposition of Molly were pressed to a legal decision, she would undoubtedly be given to her mother.

"The court does not recognize your subtilties, Shore," his lawyer told him, and looked as though he would like to add his own opinion on the subject. But his client's face did not encourage him.

Philip Shore did not go back at once to Old Chester. He must, he told himself, be alone to meet the question of giving up Molly to her mother or giving up his convictions. Nor did he communicate with his wife; and, her letter to Roger still unsent, Cecil was ignorant of the legal probabilities. She was not exactly anxious about them, but she was irritated at the delay. If there were go

"Yes. I want you to give me your word of honor not to go away in my absence."

Cecil laughed. "Oh, Philip, how melodramatic!"

"Give me your word."

"I hadn't thought of abducting her," she assured him; "that sort of thing is n't my style. I much prefer you to find out from your lawyer how absurd you are to suppose that you have any claim." And then she took up Monsieur, Madame, et Bébé, and he went away.

"How silly in him to make all this fuss!" she thought, looking absently over the top of the book; "but I suppose I must consult somebody."

And later in the evening, half reluctantly, half eagerly, she wrote to Mr. Roger Carey, saying that she wished to consult him on a matter of business. As she sealed the letter, she remembered, with some annoyance, that she did not know his address. She could find out from Lyssie; and yet, oddly enough,

to know it. Roger Carey could tell her; and yet some strange instinct made her still delay to ask Lyssie for his address; perhaps an unconscious application of the Mosaic command that at least one shall not seethe a kid in its mother's milk.

She explained this reluctance to herself by saying that Lyssie would wonder why she was writing to him. "And there 's no use in telling her until the last moment," she thought, softening. "Poor Lys! she 'll be so distressed." The grief of it all to Lyssie was in her mind, as, in the small jewel of a room which she used as a morning-room, she sat, after dinner, idly looking at a pile of unanswered letters on her writing-desk. A little fire was burning on the hearth, repeating itself in faint gleams on the dark furniture, in the sconces high up between the windows, and in the long mirror that, divided by gilded pilasters, hung lengthwise above the mantel.

To Lyssie, pushing the door open, and coming smiling into the room, it had never looked more peaceful: the flicker