d Mademoiselle, and turning clumped back in her
bedroom slippers to her room.

Ellen went up to her room. Heretofore she had given her allegiance to
Mademoiselle and Mrs. Cardew, and in a more remote fashion, to Howard.
But Ellen, crying angry tears in her small white bed that night, sensed
a new division in the family, with Mademoiselle and Anthony and Howard
and Grace on one side, and Lily standing alone, fighting valiantly for
the right to live her own life, to receive her own friends, and the
friends of her friends, even though one of these latter might be a
servant in her own house.

Yet Ellen, with the true snobbishness of the servants' hall, disapproved
of Lily's course while she admired it.

"But they're all against her," Ellen reflected. "The poor thing! And
just because of Willy Cameron. Well, I'll stand by her, if they throw me
out for it."

In her romantic head there formed strange, delightful visions. Lily
eloping with Willy Cameron, assisted by herself. Lily in the little
Cameron house, astounding the neighborhood with her clothes and her
charm, and being sponsored by Ellen. The excitement of the village, and
the visits to Ellen to learn what to wear for a first call, and were
cards necessary?

Into Ellen's not very hard-working but monotonous life had comes its
first dream of romance.

CHAPTER XIII

For three weeks Lily did not see Louis Akers, nor did she go back to the
house on Cardew Way. She hated doing clandestine or forbidden things,
and she was, too, determined to add nothing to the tenseness she began
to realize existed at home. She went through her days, struggling to fit
herself again into the old environment, reading to her mother,
lending herself with assumed enthusiasm to such small gayeties as Lent
permitted, and doing penance in a dozen ways for that stolen afternoon
with Louis Akers.

She had been forbidden to see him again. It had come about by Grace's
confession to Howard as to Lily's visit to the Doyles. He had not
objected to that.

"Unless Doyle talks his rubbish to her," he said. "She said something
the other night that didn't sound like her. Was any one else there?"

"An attorney named Akers," she said.

And at that Howard had scowled.

"She'd better keep away altogether," he observed, curtly. "She oughtn't
to meet men like that."

"Shall I tell her?"

"I'll tell her," he said. And tell her he did, not too tactfully, and
man-like shielding her by not tellin