ooking now, with
warmth, even with gratitude, after she had been so hateful. And Esther
was receiving it all with the prettiest grace. She might even have been
pinning the olive leaf into her dress.

"Well," said he. "Well!"

Lydia was maliciously glad that even he could find nothing more to say.

"What a pleasant morning," he ended lamely yet safely, and conceived the
brilliant addition, "You'll stay to dinner." As he said it he was
conscious, too late, that dinner was several hours away. And meantime
Esther stood and looked up in his eyes with an expression for which
Lydia at once mentally found a name: soulful, that was what it was, she
viciously decided.

Madame Beattie gave a little ironic crow of laughter.

"Sit down, Esther," she said, "and let Mr. Blake shake hands with me.
No, I can't stay to dinner. Esther may, if she likes, but I've business
on my hands. It's with that dirty little man Jeff's got such a prejudice
against."

"Not Weedon Moore," conjectured the colonel. "If you've any law
business, Madame Beattie, you'd far better go to Alston Choate. Moore's
no kind of a man."

"He's the right kind for me," said Madame Beattie. "No manners, no
traditions, no scruples. It's a dirty job I've got for him, and it takes
a dirty man to do it."

She had risen now, and was smiling placidly up at the colonel. He
frowned at her, involuntarily. He was ready to accept Madame Beattie's
knowing neither good nor evil, but she seemed to him singularly
unpleasant in flaunting that lack of bias. She was quite conscious of
his distaste, but it didn't trouble her. Unproductive opinions were
nothing to her now, especially in Addington.

"You're not going, too," said the colonel, as Esther rose and followed
her. "I hoped--" But what he hoped he kept himself from saying.

"I must," said Esther, with a little deprecatory look and another
significant one at Madame Beattie's back. "Good-bye."

She threw Lydia, in her scornful silence there in the background, a
smile and nod.

"But--" the colonel began. Again he had to stop. How could he ask her to
come again when he was in the dark about her reason for coming at all?

"I have to go," she said. "I really have to, this time."

Meantime Jeff, handing Madame Beattie into the carriage, had had his
word with her.

"You'll do nothing until I see you."

"If you see me moderately soon," said Madame Beattie pleasantly.
"Esther, are you coming?"

"No," said Esther, with a s