ouldn't want pay. No, it isn't that; but Alice isn't able to go, and
I can't think of going without her."

This was a good reason, and Bertha, looking towards Alice, saw in her
face the pain which masks itself in color and movement. The dinner-table
was exquisite and the company gay, and Bertha felt herself a part of the
great world of dignity and beauty, where eating is made to seem a
graceful art, and wine is only a bit of color and not a lure. She
vaguely comprehended that this little party was of a tone and quality of
the best the world over--that it was of a part and interfused with the
dining customs of London and Paris and New York. "It will be _au fait_,"
Miss Franklin had said, sententiously, "for Alice Heath _knows_."

Mrs. Crego, who sat nearly opposite, stared at the girl in stupefaction.
"She makes me feel dowdy," she had confessed to Lee in the
dressing-room. "Why didn't you warn me to come in my best? Who has been
coaching her? Alice Heath, I suppose." She now wondered as sharply over
the girl's manner; for Bertha, carried out of herself by Ben's word of
praise, felt no desire to drink or to eat, and her reticence and the
delicacy of her appetite conferred a distinction which concealed her
lack of small talk, and protected her from the criticism to which
exuberance of manner ordinarily exposed her.

She was deeply impressed, too, with Ben's management of the waiters, and
with the ease and skill with which he supported Alice in carrying
forward the courses. It was a revelation of training which instructed
her absurdly, for her mind was quick to link and compare. It leaped so
swiftly and so subtilely along connecting lines of thought that a hint
alone sufficed to set in motion a hundred latent memories and inherited
aptitudes. Her father had been a man of native refinement, and she
possessed unstirred deeps of character, as Alice now well understood.
And from her end of the table she glanced often at the sweetly smiling
girl-wife whose beauty abashed Haney. At last she said to him: "Your
wife is very lovely to-night, Captain."

He hesitated a moment; then replied, slowly: "She is. She's as fine as
anny queen!" Then after another pause, added: "And the more shame to me,
being what I am! She's a good girl, miss, true as steel. Never a word of
complaint or a frown. She bears with me like an angel."

"You're doing a great deal for her."

His face lightened. "So she says. I mean to do more. I mean to show h