ins. "Marguerite, Regent Street. Try on at six. All Spanish lace.
Pearls. The full length." That was the first; it had no signature.
"Lady Agnes Orme, Hyde Park Place. Impossible to-night, dining Haddon.
Opera to-morrow, promised Fritz, but could do play Wednesday. Will try
Haddon for Savoy, and anything in the world you like, if you can get
Gussy. Sunday Montenero. Sit Mason Monday, Tuesday. Marguerite awful.
Cissy." That was the second. The third, the girl noted when she took
it, was on a foreign form: "Everard, Hotel Brighton, Paris. Only
understand and believe. 22nd to 26th, and certainly 8th and 9th. Perhaps
others. Come. Mary."

Mary was very handsome, the handsomest woman, she felt in a moment, she
had ever seen--or perhaps it was only Cissy. Perhaps it was both, for
she had seen stranger things than that--ladies wiring to different
persons under different names. She had seen all sorts of things and
pieced together all sorts of mysteries. There had once been one--not
long before--who, without winking, sent off five over five different
signatures. Perhaps these represented five different friends who had
asked her--all women, just as perhaps now Mary and Cissy, or one or other
of them, were wiring by deputy. Sometimes she put in too much--too much
of her own sense; sometimes she put in too little; and in either case
this often came round to her afterwards, for she had an extraordinary way
of keeping clues. When she noticed she noticed; that was what it came
to. There were days and days, there were weeks sometimes, of vacancy.
This arose often from Mr. Buckton's devilish and successful subterfuges
for keeping her at the sounder whenever it looked as if anything might
arouse; the sounder, which it was equally his business to mind, being the
innermost cell of captivity, a cage within the cage, fenced oft from the
rest by a frame of ground glass. The counter-clerk would have played
into her hands; but the counter-clerk was really reduced to idiocy by the
effect of his passion for her. She flattered herself moreover, nobly,
that with the unpleasant conspicuity of this passion she would never have
consented to be obliged to him. The most she would ever do would be
always to shove off on him whenever she could the registration of
letters, a job she happened particularly to loathe. After the long
stupors, at all events, there almost always suddenly would come a sharp
taste of something; it was in