s daughter had more power of
healing than the great Welstoke herself, and among them, too, was rich
and terribly cultured people, who would come with veils in closed
carriages and would be afraid their husbands would find out, and then,
if they didn't pay the bill rendered, all that was necessary was to
threaten suit to have them go into a panic and rush the money to us in a
hurry. It is wonderful how easy a person drops into new views of what is
fair and right when their surroundings change, and something else is
wonderful--the fact that I, who sit here with the two of you now, a
broken old housemaid, once had gowns as fashionable as any on the
Continent, and that without a penny of inheritance or a single love
affair.

"All is well with us," Welstoke used to say, "and all will be well if
you have the sense to keep out of a match with some lying-tongued
creature who, on his side, will believe nothing you say, and will cast
sheeps' eyes at every plump blonde from Benares to Buffalo. Besides
which, my dear, there never was one of them that didn't snore. Remember
that and you are safe."

Indeed, I thought I was safe, as she called it. I believed that the
affectionate natures of my father and of my mother had offset each other
in me, for three years went by and never a thought did I give to love of
man. And when it came, there was a flit of it like the shadow of a
flying bird that comes and goes on the wall and is none the less hard to
forget. It is so with all, I'm thinking, high and low, rich and poor; we
see these shadows of what might be, and whist! they are gone again, as
if to say we'd live again in another world and there is plenty of time
in other lives than ours--time for the right head to lean on the
shoulder that was meant for it and this hand to touch that!

Be that as it may, the thing happened the winter we were at Venice.
Madame Welstoke was in her heyday then, with plenty of money to give
dinners for the little crowd that was made up out of dark-brown
society--the old men who'd tell of nearly reaching greatness and the
like of that, with champagne running from the corners of their eyes and
their voices cracking with all the bad-spent years. And there were fat,
jeweled women, too, hanging on alimony or adventure, and middle-aged men
from this country, who had left New York or Philadelphia for one reason
or another of their own, and talked about rates of interest and whistled
tunes that were popular in the