while Mrs. Price was very busy. In looming on the
veranda it had seemed to her that her daughter and that man were
occupied with certain ceremonies. Regarding them she attacked the girl
at once.

"You have not taken him?" she began by way of reconnaissance.

That afternoon Fanny had visited ruins. There were others more
personal that she was viewing then, the ruins of fair things not dead
but destroyed.

"Answer me," Mrs. Price commanded.

The girl started. But she had been far away--in that lovely land where
dreams come true and then, it may be, turn into nightmares. Through
the dreams hand in hand with Loftus she had been strolling. Now she
must put them all away.

"Answer me," Mrs. Price repeated.

"I am afraid so."

Into a misty and deserted parlor of the Inn Mrs. Price pulled the girl
and there let fire.

"Afraid! You ought to be! What will your father say?"

The father here projected was a gentleman who resided abroad and who
seldom opened his mouth except to put something in it.

"And Fred!"

Fred was Fanny's brother, a young chap whose opinions were of no value
to anyone, himself included.

"And everybody!"

Everybody was the upper current of social life.

"And Sylvia!"

The earlier shots had not inflicted any visible damage, but this must
have told.

"I shall have to write to her," Fanny with unusual meekness replied.

"Yes, do. Do by all means. Tell her you have taken her leavings. And
why? Merciful heavens, why? If you were as staid and stiff as she I
could understand. But a girl like you, with your tastes, your
extravagances, a girl with a national reputation for beauty, to go and
accept twenty-five thousand a year is--is--sinful, that's what it is.
Your own father has that, and on it we are out at elbows. It is just
about enough for you to dress on. Oh, Fanny, Fanny!"

Hysterically the old lady waved her hands. "Oh, Fanny, I have so
prayed that you would make a brilliant match. I have scrimped and
saved that you might, and you go and take a blond beast of a pauper.
It is too cruel!"

Fanny winced. It was cruel. But the cruelty was not hers. It was
Fate's. She too had hoped for the very marriage her mother had so
ardently desired. But Loftus had not cared. Occupied elsewhere he had
sailed away. As well then Annandale as another.

"You see, you know," she said in a wretched effort at smoothing things
over, "he is quite a hero."

But this was too much. Mrs. Price shook her head li