ent of the ample allowance which Mrs.
Hawley-Crowles settled upon her seemed a fortune--enough, she thought,
to buy the whole town of Simiti! Her gowns seemed woven on fairy
looms, and often she would sit for hours, holding them in her lap and
reveling in their richness. Then, when at length she could bring
herself to don the robes and peep timidly into the great pier glasses,
she would burst into startled exclamations and hide her face in her
hands, lest the gorgeous splendor of the beautiful reflection
overpower her.

"Oh," she would exclaim, "it can't be that the girl reflected there
ever lived and dressed as I did in Simiti! I wonder, oh, I wonder if
Padre Jose knew that these things were in the world!"

And then, as she leaned back in her chair and gave herself into the
hands of the admiring French maid, she would close her eyes and dream
that the fairy-stories which the patient Jose had told her again and
again in her distant home town had come true, and that she had been
transformed into a beautiful princess, who would some day go in search
of the sleeping priest and wake him from his mesmeric dream.

Then would come the inevitable thought of the little newsboy of
Cartagena, to whom she had long since begun to send monetary
contributions--and of her unanswered letters--of the war devastating
her native land--of rudely severed ties, and unimaginable changes--and
she would start from her musing and brush away the gathering tears,
and try to realize that her present situation and environment were but
means to an end, opportunities which her God had given her to do His
work, with no thought of herself.

A few days after Carmen had been installed in her new home, during
which she had left the house only for her diurnal ride in the big
limousine, Mrs. Hawley-Crowles announced her readiness to fire the
first gun in the attack upon the Beaubien. "My dear," she said to her
sister, as they sat alone in the luxurious sun-parlor, "my washerwoman
dropped a remark the other day which gave me something to build on.
Her two babies are in the General Orphan Asylum, up on Twenty-third
street. Well, it happens that this institution is the Beaubien's sole
charity--in fact, it is her particular hobby. I presume that she feels
she is now a middle-aged woman, and that the time is not far distant
when she will have to close up her earthly accounts and hand them over
to the heavenly auditor. Anyway, this last year or two she has
sud