e slowly to the door and stood there. She
looked like a sulky child, with the beauty of the child and the charm.
She hated Madame Beattie too much to gaze directly at her, but she knew
what she should see if she did look: an old woman absolutely brazen in
her defiance of the softening arts of dress, divested of every
bewildering subterfuge, sitting in a circle of candlelight in the
adequate company of her book.

"Esther," said Madame Beattie, "you may have the necklace."

Then Esther did glance quickly at her. She wondered what Madame Beattie
thought she could get out of giving up the adored gewgaw into other
hands.

"I don't want it," said Madame Beattie. "I'd much rather have the money
for it. Get the money and bring it to me."

Esther curled her lip a little in the scorn she really felt. She could
not conceive of any woman's being so lost to woman's perquisites as to
confess baldly her need of money above trinkets.

"But you'd better go to the right man for it," said Madame Beattie. "It
isn't Alston Choate. Jeff's the man, my dear. He's cleverer than the
devil if you once get him started. Not that I think you could. He's
done with you, I fancy."

Esther, still speechless, wondered if she could. It was a challenge of
precisely the force Madame Beattie meant it to be.

XXXII

The next morning, a sweet one of warmth and gently drifting leaves,
Esther went to call on Lydia, and Madame Beattie, with a satirical grin,
looked after her from the window. Madame Beattie's understanding of the
human mind had given her a dramatic hold on the world when the world
loved her, and it was mechanically serving her now in these little deeds
that were only of a mean importance, though, from the force of habit,
she played the game so hard. Esther was very fresh and pretty in her
white dress with an artful parasol that cast a freshening glow. She had
the right expression, too, the calmness of one who makes a commonplace
morning call.

And it was not Lydia who saw her coming. It was Jeff, in his working
blouse and shabby trousers, standing on a cool corner of the veranda and
finishing his morning smoke before he went out to picking early apples.
Esther knew at precisely what instant he caught sight of her, and saw
him knock out his pipe into the garden bed below the veranda and lay it
on the rail. Then he waited for her, and she was almost amusedly
prepared for his large-eyed wonder and the set of the jaw which betrayed