abit and had a crooked stick and carried all her belongings
tied up in a handkerchief. She looked like a pilgrim to a saint's
shrine. Rose took her to the house. She asked when she saw it: 'And
does this big place really belong to our Rita?' My maid of course said
that it was mine. 'And how long did our Rita live here?'--'Madame has
never seen it unless perhaps the outside, as far as I know. I believe
Mr. Allegre lived here for some time when he was a young man.'--'The
sinner that's dead?'--'Just so,' says Rose. You know nothing ever
startles Rose. 'Well, his sins are gone with him,' said my sister, and
began to make herself at home.

"Rose was going to stop with her for a week but on the third day she was
back with me with the remark that Mlle. Therese knew her way about very
well already and preferred to be left to herself. Some little time
afterwards I went to see that sister of mine. The first thing she said
to me, 'I wouldn't have recognized you, Rita,' and I said, 'What a funny
dress you have, Therese, more fit for the portress of a convent than for
this house.'--'Yes,' she said, 'and unless you give this house to me,
Rita, I will go back to our country. I will have nothing to do with your
life, Rita. Your life is no secret for me.'

"I was going from room to room and Therese was following me. 'I don't
know that my life is a secret to anybody,' I said to her, 'but how do you
know anything about it?' And then she told me that it was through a
cousin of ours, that horrid wretch of a boy, you know. He had finished
his schooling and was a clerk in a Spanish commercial house of some kind,
in Paris, and apparently had made it his business to write home whatever
he could hear about me or ferret out from those relations of mine with
whom I lived as a girl. I got suddenly very furious. I raged up and
down the room (we were alone upstairs), and Therese scuttled away from me
as far as the door. I heard her say to herself, 'It's the evil spirit in
her that makes her like this.' She was absolutely convinced of that.
She made the sign of the cross in the air to protect herself. I was
quite astounded. And then I really couldn't help myself. I burst into a
laugh. I laughed and laughed; I really couldn't stop till Therese ran
away. I went downstairs still laughing and found her in the hall with
her face to the wall and her fingers in her ears kneeling in a corner. I
had to pull her out by the shoulders fro