was genuinely annoyed.

"I am seriously displeased with you, Dawkins!" she returned severely.
"Of course, I am shocked at any girl in my household misbehaving
herself, but--I--wouldn't want her to be sent away--under such
circumstances. It would be quite heartless. Yes, I am very much
disturbed!"

"I'm sorry, ma'am," answered the housekeeper penitently. "But I was only
thinking of the other girls."

"Well, it's too late to do anything about it now," repeated her
mistress. "But I'm sorry, Dawkins; very sorry, indeed. We have
responsibilities toward these people! However--this is Thursday, isn't
it?--we'll have veal for lunch as usual--and she was so pretty!" she
added inconsequently.

"H'm. That was the trouble!" sniffed the housekeeper. "We're well rid of
her. You'd think a girl would have some consideration for her
employer--if nothing else. In a sense she is a guest in the house and
should behave herself as such!"

"Yes, that is quite true!" agreed her employer. "Still--yes, Brown Betty
is very well for dessert. That will do, Dawkins."

Behind the curtain of this casual conversation had been enacted a
melodrama as intensely vital and elemental as any of Shakespeare's
tragedies, for the day Dawkins had fired Katie O'Connell--"for reasons,"
as she said--and told her to go back where she came from or anywhere she
liked for that matter, so long as she got out of her sight, Katie's
brother Shane in the back room of McManus' gin palace gave Red
McGurk--for the same "reasons"--a certain option and, the latter having
scornfully declined to avail himself of it, had then and there put a
bullet through his neck. But this, naturally, Miss Beekman did not know.

As may have been already surmised Miss Althea was a gracious, gentle and
tender-hearted lady who never knowingly would have done a wrong to
anybody and who did not believe that simply because God had been pleased
to call her into a state of life at least three stories higher than her
kitchen she was thereby relieved from her duty toward those who occupied
it. Nevertheless, from the altitude of those three stories she viewed
them as essentially different from herself, for she came of what is
known as "a long line of ancestors." As, however, Katie O'Connell and
Althea Beekman were practically contemporaries, it is somewhat difficult
to understand how one of them could have had a succession of ancestors
that was any longer than that of the other. Indeed, Miss Beekman