a pair of
ivory-handled manicure scissors, lifted her three-hundred-dollar
fur-lined coat from a hook behind the door and proceeded deliberately
to ruin both scissors and coat by slitting the back of the coat up
nearly to the waist-line, so that she could wear it comfortably on
horseback. Her black broadcloth skirt was in imminent danger of the
same surgical revision when a shocked young waitress with the
breakfast tray in her hands uttered shrill protest.

"Oh, don't go and ruin your skirt that way! They've got you a
four-horse team and sleigh, Mrs. Corey. Mercy, ain't it awful about
that poor girl being lost? Excuse me--are you her mother, Mrs. Corey?"

Mrs. Singleton Corey, sitting now upon the bed, lifted her aloof
glance from the mutilated coat. "Set the things on the chair, there,
since there is no table. I do not know the girl at all." And she
added, since it seemed necessary to make oneself very plain to these
people: "I think that will be all, thank you." She even went a step
farther and gave the girl a tip, which settled all further overtures
toward conversation.

The girl went off and cried, and called Mrs. Singleton Corey a
stuck-up old hen who would freeze--and serve her right. She even hoped
that Mrs. Singleton Corey would get stuck in a snowdrift and have to
walk every step of the way to Toll-Gate. Leaving her breakfast when it
was all on the table, just as if it would hurt her to eat in the same
room with people, and then acting like that to a person! She wished
she had let the old catamaran spoil her skirt; and so on.

Mrs. Singleton Corey never troubled herself over the impression she
made upon the servant class. She regretted the publicity that seemed
to have been given her arrival and her further journey into the
hills. It annoyed her to have the girl calling her Mrs. Corey so
easily; it seemed to imply an intimate acquaintance with her errand
which was disquieting in the extreme. Was it possible that the
Humphrey woman had been talking to outsiders? Or had the police really
gotten upon the trail of Jack?

She hurried into her warmest things, drank the coffee because it would
stimulate her for the terrible journey ahead of her, and went down to
find the four-horse team waiting outside, tails whipping between
shivering hind legs, hips drawn down as for a lunge forward, heads
tossing impatiently. The red-faced driver was bundled to his eyes and
did not say a word while he tucked the robes snugly