Letty thought she had never seen anything so dainty, though her
experienced eye could detect the fact that nothing had really cost
money. As an opening to the career on which she had embarked the
setting was unexpected, while the method of her treatment was
bewildering. In the black recesses of her heart Miss Henrietta Towell
might be hiding all those feline machinations which Mrs. Judson Flack
had led Letty to believe a part of the great world's stock-in-trade;
but it couldn't be denied that she hid them well. Letty didn't know
what to make of it. "There's quite a trick to it," Steptoe had warned
her; but the explanation seemed inadequate to the phenomena.

Sipping her coffee and crunching her toast she was driven to ponder on
the ways of wickedness. She had expected them to be more obvious. All
her information was to the effect that an unprotected girl in a world
of males was a lamb among lions, a victim with no way of escape. That
she was a lamb among lions, and a victim with no way of escape, she
was still prepared to believe; only the preliminaries puzzled her.
Instead of being crude, direct, indelicate, they were subtle and
misleading. After twenty-four hours in Miss Towell's spare room there
was still no hint of anything but coddling.

"You see, my dear," Miss Towell had said, "if I don't nurse you back
to real 'ealth, him that gave you the thimble might be displeased with
me."

It was not often that Miss Towell dropped an _h_ or added one; but in
moments of emotion early habit was too strong for her.

Coming into the room now, on some ermine's errand of neatness, she
threw a glance at Letty, and said: "You don't _look_ like a Rashleigh,
do you, dear? But then you never can tell anything about families from
looks, can you?"

It was her nearest approach as yet to the personal, and Letty
considered as to how she was to meet it. "I'm not a Rashleigh--not
really--only by--by marriage. Rashleigh isn't my real name.
It's--it's the name I'm going by in pictures."

"Oh!"

Miss Towell's exclamation was the subdued one of acquiescence. She
knew that ladies in pictures often preferred names other than their
own, and if Letty was not a Rashleigh it "explained things." That is,
it explained how anyone called Rashleigh could be wandering about in
this friendless way, though it made 'Enery Steptoe's intervention the
more mysterious. It was conceivable that he might act on behalf of a
genuine Rashleigh, however out at e