tle things for her; fetched
and carried chairs and cushions and rugs, and gave his attentions the
air of pleasantries. One of his offices was to get the ladies' letters
for them in the evening, and one night he came in beaming with a letter
for each of them where they sat together in the parlour. He distributed
them into their laps.

"Hello! I've made a mistake," he said, putting down his head to take
back the letter he had dropped in Miss Pasmer's lap. "I've given you my
wife's letter."

The girl glanced at it, gave a moaning kind of cry, and fell beak in her
chair, hiding her face in her hands.

Mrs. Brinkley, possessed herself of the other letter, and, though past
the age when ladies wish to kill their husbands for their stupidity,
she gave Brinkley a look of massacre which mystified even more than
it murdered his innocence. He had to learn later from his wife's more
elicit fury what the women had all known instantly.

He showed his usefulness in gathering Alice up and getting her to her
mother's room.

"Oh, Mrs. Brinkley," implored Mrs. Pasmer, following her to the door,
"is Mr. Mavering coming here?"

"I don't know--I can't say--I haven't read the letter yet."

"Oh, do let me know when you've read it, won't you? I don't know what we
shall do."

Mrs. Brinkley read the letter in her own room. "You go down," she said
to her husband, with unabated ferocity; "and telegraph Dan Mavering at
Wormley's not to came. Say we're going away at once."

Then she sent Mrs. Pasmer a slip of paper on which she had written, "Not
coming."

It has been the experience of every one to have some alien concern come
into his life and torment him with more anxiety than any affair of his
own. This is, perhaps, a hint from the infinite sympathy which feels
for us all that none of us can hope to free himself from the troubles of
others, that we are each bound to each by ties which, for the most part,
we cannot perceive, but which, at the moment their stress comes, we
cannot break.

Mrs. Brinkley lay awake and raged impotently against her complicity with
the unhappiness of that distasteful girl and her more than distasteful
mother. In her revolt against it she renounced the interest she had
felt in that silly boy, and his ridiculous love business, so really
unimportant to her whatever turn it took. She asked herself what it
mattered to her whether those children marred their lives one way or
another way. There was a lurid moment be