repugnance. The address was written in a coarse masculine hand. The
carriage had gone two blocks before she found the necessary courage to
open the letter. The envelope had already been opened, so in reading
it her conscience suggested nothing criminal.

Gossip began on the day Eve entered the Garden of Eden. To be sure,
there was little to gossip about, but that little Eve managed without
difficulty to collect. It is but human to take a harmless interest in
what our next-door neighbor is doing, has done, or may do. Primarily
gossip was harmless; to-day it is still harmless in some quarters. The
gossip of the present time is like the prude, always looking for the
worst and finding it. The real trouble with the gossip lies in the
fact that she has little else to do; her own affairs are so
uninteresting that she is perforce obliged to look into the affairs of
her neighbors. Then, to prove that she is well informed, she feels
compelled to repeat what she has seen or heard, more or less
accurately. From gossiping to meddling is but a trifling step. To back
up a bit of gossip, one often meddles. Mrs. Franklyn-Haldene was
naturally a daughter of Eve; she was more than a gossip, she was a
prophetess. She foretold scandal. She would move Heaven and earth, so
the saying goes, to prove her gossip infallible. And when some
prophecy of hers went wrong, she did everything in her power to right
it. To have acquired the reputation of prophesying is one thing,
always to fulfil these prophecies is another. It never occurred to her
that she was destroying other people's peace of mind, that she was
constituting herself a Fate, that she was meddling with lives which in
no wise crossed or interfered with her own. She had no real enmity
either for Warrington or Mrs. Jack; simply, she had prophesied that
Warrington had taken up his residence in Herculaneum in order to be
near Katherine Challoner, John Bennington's wife. Here was a year
nearly gone, and the smoke of the prophecy had evaporated, showing
that there had been no fire below.

Neither Warrington nor Mrs. Jack was in her thoughts when she opened
the letter, which was signed by McQuade's familiar appellation.

Dear Girl--I've got them all this trip. I'll put Bennington on the
rack and wring Warrington's political neck, the snob, swelling it
around among decent people! What do you think? Why, Warrington used to
run after the Challoner woman before she was married; and I have proof
t