d with their surprise.

"Another sacred cause to fight for," sighed the dowager, with a quaint
grimace. "Last week it was the Jews, who seem to me quite able to take
care of themselves! Next week it may be Hindoo widows; but just now it
is Kora!"

"She should have been born a boy in the age when it was thought a
virtue to don armor and do battle for the weak or incapable; that
would have suited Judithe."

"Not if it was the fashion," laughed the Countess Helene; "she would
insist on being original."

"The Marquise has a lovely name," remarked Mrs. McVeigh; "one could
not imagine a weak or unattractive person called Judithe."

"No; they could not," agreed her friend, "it makes one think of the
tragedy of Holofernes. It suggests the strange, the fascinating, the
unusual, and--it suits Madame la Marquise."

"Your approval is an unconscious compliment to me," remarked the
dowager, indulging herself in a tiny pinch of snuff and tapping the
jeweled lid of the box; "I named her."

"Indeed!" and Mrs. McVeigh smiled at the complacent old lady, while
the Countess Helene almost stared. Evidently she, also, had heard the
opinions concerning the young widow's foreign extraction. Possibly the
dowager guessed what was passing in her mind, for she nodded and
smiled.

"Truly, the eyes did it. Though she was not so fully developed as now,
those slumbrous, oriental eyes of hers suggested someway that beauty
of Bethulia; the choice was left to me and so she was christened
Judithe."

"She voices such startlingly paganish ideas at times that I can
scarcely imagine her at the christening font," remarked the Countess.

"In truth her questions are hard to answer sometimes. But the heart is
all right."

"And the lady herself magnetic enough without the added suggestion of
the name," remarked Mrs. McVeigh; then she held up her finger as the
Countess was about to speak, for from the music room came the
appealing legato notes of "Suwanee River," played with great
tenderness.

"What is it?" asked the dowager.

"One of our American folk songs," and the grey eyes of the speaker
were bright with tears; "in all my life I have never heard it played
so exquisitely."

"For a confirmed blue stocking, the Marquise understands remarkably
well how to make her little compliments," said the Countess Helene.

Mrs. McVeigh arose, and with a slight bow to the dowager, passed into
the alcove. At the last bar of the song a shadow fell across the