tress of Greenriver?"

"Oh, heaps of people," said Toni recklessly. "You know quite well you
were ashamed of me when we first went out to dinner parties here, and I
didn't know how to behave--and lately we have been invited nowhere--not
even to the Golf Club Ball."

Owen bit his lip. In truth the matter of the ball had puzzled him
considerably. Although not a golfer, he was on friendly terms with many
of the members of the local Club; and since Toni's friends, Mollie and
Cynthia Teach, were ardent golfers, it had seemed most probable that
Owen and his wife would receive an invitation to the annual ball.

The Tobies had indeed gone so far as to assure Toni of her invitation
when first the ball was mentioned; and though as the day grew near the
two girls grew uneasy when the topic was broached, Toni never dreamed
that their avoidance of the subject covered a real and distressing
awkwardness.

Certainly neither Toni nor Owen imagined that they had been quietly
excluded from the list of guests; but such was the astounding fact, as
Mollie and Cynthia were guiltily aware.

It was largely due to Lady Martin's plain-speaking that this came about.

Somehow the real truth about Eva Herrick had leaked out; as such truths
do invariably leak out; and Toni's ill-advised friendship with Herrick's
wife was easily turned to her disadvantage by so skilful an adversary as
Lady Martin.

From the first her ladyship had been unable to bring herself to tolerate
Toni; and had lost no opportunity of spreading abroad Toni's rash
admission as to the nature of her cousin's employment--with the
immediate result that in a good many people's eyes Toni herself was
looked upon as an unusually fortunate shop-girl raised by a stroke of
good luck to a position which she was quite unsuited to adorn.

Possibly there was in the case of some of her detractors an element of
jealousy in their comments on Owen Rose's wife. There were a good many
houses along the river where daughters were at a discount; and to see an
unknown and attractive girl like Toni step into the place which many of
these girls would have dearly liked to fill was doubtless somewhat
galling.

At any rate Lady Martin found plenty of supporters when she broached her
avowed intention of excluding Mrs. Rose from the ball of which she was
patroness, on the ground of her friendship with the woman who had been,
as they all knew, in prison for a serious offence; and so it happened
that wh