ng until he'd come home some
night and find her gone. I haven't one bit of respect for her."

"Oh, now, Mrs. Smith, you're too hard on her. She's young and pretty
and likes a good time." Mrs. Corbett was giving her steel knives a
quick rub with ashes out of deference to the lady stoppers. "It's easy
enough for folks like us," waving her knife to include all present, "to
be very respectable and never get ourselves talked about, for nobody's
askin' us to go to dances or fly around with them, but with her it's
different. Don't be hard on her! She ain't goin' to do anything she
shouldn't."

But the ladies were loath to adopt Mrs. Corbett's point of view. All
their lives nothing had happened, and here was a deliciously exciting
possible scandal, and they clung to it.

"They say the old man Grant is nearly a millionaire, and he's getting
lonely for her, and is pretty near ready to forgive her and Fred and
take them back. Wouldn't it be awful if the old man should come up here
and find she'd gone with Rance Belmont?"

Mrs. Berry looked anxiously around the kitchen as if searching for the
lost one.

"Oh, don't worry," declared Mrs. Corbett; "she ain't a quitter. She'll
stay with her own man; they're happy as ever I saw two people."

"If she did go," Miss Thornley said, sentimentally, "if she did go, do
you suppose she'd leave a note pinned on the pin-cushion? I think they
mostly do!"

When the ladies had gone that afternoon, and while Mrs. Corbett washed
the white ironstone dishes, she was not nearly so composed and
confident in mind as she pretended to be.

"Don't it beat the band how much they find out? I often wonder how
things get to be known. I do wish she wouldn't give them the chance to
talk, but she's not the one that will take tellin'--too much like her
father for that--and still I kind o' like her for her spunky ways.
Rance is a divil, but she don't know that. It is pretty hard to tell
what ought to be done. This is surely work for the Almighty, and not
for sinful human beings!"

That night Mrs. Corbett took her pen in hand. Mrs. Corbett was more at
home with the potato-masher or the rolling-pin, but when duty called
her she followed, even though it involved the using of unfamiliar
tools.

She wrote a lengthy letter to Mr. Robert Grant, care of The Imperial
Lumber Company, Toronto, Ontario:

"Dear and respected sir," Mrs. Corbett wrote, "I take my pen in hand to
write you a few things that maybe you don