r
figure and face. Although unlike Deb in every way, people were
beginning to compare them as rival beauties--Frances' private opinion
being that there was no comparison. She had nearly done with
governesses, short frocks and pigtails, and was ardently anticipating
the power and glory coming to her when she should be a full-grown woman.

Two days after the clandestine postage of her letter to Captain Carey,
a new housemaid brought Mary his visiting-card on a silver tray. Mary
knew, before looking at it--having heard nothing of the letter, and no
sound of his arrival in his hired buggy--what name it bore. Her forlorn
hope had been too forlorn to stand for anything but despair. She had
expected the catastrophe from the first.

CHAPTER X.

How she got into the room--the isolated big drawing-room, which
somebody else, who was aware of his arrival, had directed that he was
to be shown into--Mary knew not; but she was there. He stood perfectly
still, massive and inflexible, to receive her. Without approaching
him--or he her--to shake hands, without looking at his face or anywhere
near it, she perceived the adamantine set of lips, the cold gaze, more
withering than fire, which informed her that he knew all; and she sank
crouching into a chair, and hid her face. But her back was against the
wall now. The coward stage was past. In the most desperately false
position that a girl could occupy, she made no further attempt to run
away from the truth, perhaps because she saw that it was useless. When
he began, very politely, but with no beating about the bush, to say: "I
daresay you are surprised to see me, Miss Pennycuick, but I was
told--and since I came up here I have been told again by several
different persons--something that I want you to help me to understand,"
she jerked herself upright, and stopped him with a swift gesture and
the cry of: "I know! I know what you have been told; and I have nothing
to say. I cannot contradict it."

She was a piteous object, in her shaking anguish; but he looked at her,
of course, without a scrap of pity.

"Do you think you really know?" he questioned her, with cold gravity.
"Perhaps I have been given an exaggerated version. I was in hopes that
it was altogether an invention of Miss Francie's--I know of old that
she is prone to make reckless statements--"

"Ah-h--Francie!"

"She was kind enough to write me a long letter, to congratulate me on
my promotion. She told me all the