u never would mention it any more than I would, and
yet it's just as well to have this sort of thing straightened out!
Chris told me"--said Alice, looking straight at Norma, who had grown a
trifle pale, and was watching her fixedly--"Chris told me that some
months before you were married, he told you of some--some ridiculous
suspicions we had--it seems absurd now!--about Annie."

So that was it! Norma could breathe again.

"Yes--we talked about it one morning walking home from church," she
admitted.

"I don't know whether you know now," Alice said, quickly, flushing
nervously, "that there wasn't one shred of foundation for that--that
crazy suspicion of mine! But I give you my word--and my mother told
me!--that it wasn't so. I don't know how I ever came to think of it, or
why I thought Mama admitted it. But I've realized," said Alice,
nervously, "that it was a terrible injustice to Annie, and as soon as
Chris told me that you knew it--and of course he had _no business_ to
let it get any further!--I wanted to set it straight. Poor Annie; she
would be perfectly frantic if she knew how calmly I was saddling her
with a--a terrible past!" said Alice, laughing. "But I have always been
too sensitive where the people I love are concerned, and I blundered
into this--this outrageous----"

"My aunt had told me that it was not so," Norma said, coolly and
superbly interrupting the somewhat incoherent story. "If I ever really
believed it----!" she added, scornfully.

For her heart was hot with rage, and the first impulse was to vent it
upon this nearest of the supercilious Melroses. This was all Alice had
wanted then, in sending that little overture of friendship: to tell the
little nobody that she was nothing to the great family, after all, to
prevent her from ever boasting even an illicit relationship! It was for
a formal snub, a definite casting-off, that Norma had been brought all
the way from the little green-and-white house in New Jersey! Her eyes
grew very bright, and her lips very firm, as she and Alice finished the
topic, and she told herself that she would never, never enter the house
of Liggett again!

Alice, this load off her mind, and the family honour secure, became much
more friendly, and she and Norma were talking animatedly when Leslie and
Annie came unexpectedly in. They had been to a debutante luncheon, and
were going to a debutante tea, and meanwhile wanted a few minutes with
dear Alice, and the latest news