final solution. He feared lest
he might somehow have blundered upon some sad family secret. Even with
twenty years between them, he couldn't believe that his senses had so
deceived him, couldn't but feel that that young girl had been connected
with this girl of the big dimples. And he couldn't but believe that
the girl knew it. Only there was something that prevented her
acknowledging it. It might be tragedy; perhaps it was disgrace?
Though, somehow, he couldn't think it. Poor little thing! He let her
go on her way to her bath.

But Elsie returned to the hotel and went straight to her room. She
knew she would be undisturbed there, for Miss Pritchard had gone
driving with old friends while she was to have had her swim. The girl
flung herself upon her bed and, burying her face in her pillow, shed
the bitterest tears of her life.

She had denied her mother--that darling, adorable mother who had taken
the sticky baby to her heart, and sung "Elsie Marley" to him, just as
she had later sung it to her own little girl. She had cast off her
mother and taken on--_Augusta Pritchard_! What a name to exchange for
Elizabeth Middleton! For even though the former were the mother of the
lovely Elsie Marley who had gone to Enderby, she couldn't be compared
with her beautiful mother. And, of course, her denial was far worse in
that she was dead.

How proud, how happy, how humble, she should have been to say: "Why, of
course, that was my mother! I knew it without the dimples!" What a
wretch she must be! To have had such a mother as to have so impressed
a chance stranger that he should wish to paint the Madonna in her
likeness, and should have remembered her twenty years, and to have
repudiated her utterly!

She felt that she could not bear it, could not endure such a weight on
her heart. But what could she do? Say to Mr. Graham that it _was_ her
mother and her name _was_ Middleton? Then she would have to tell
Cousin Julia everything, and she would send her away, send her off to
poke and fret in Enderby, and serve tea in a conventional parsonage
drawing-room. And she would never be an actress, and the true Elsie
Marley would be dragged on to New York.

It would be hard on Elsie-Honey, for already she seemed just to love
that poky parsonage, and was apparently quite as attached to Uncle John
as she herself was to Cousin Julia. And even Cousin Julia--already
Elsie couldn't but realize that Cousin Julia had given her