ity, and brought it back with
her. It led them straight to Warren Pemberton's office, and Pretense
fled like a shy shadow before the sun when Reality looked at her
through Pemberton's cold, dull eyes.

"Miss Madigan, Mr. Pemberton. My niece Kate," was the lady's
introduction as they entered.

The red-faced, heavy little man, too important a personage to be
expected to contribute socially to the life of the town, had been
looking at Miss Madigan as though he knew he ought to remember having
met her. She wanted something, of course. Everybody wanted something
from Warren Pemberton, King Sammy's viceroy, in charge of his mining
interests and his political plantations. But he brightened at the
formula, recollecting having heard it before from the same lady's lips,
and promptly placed her in the category of small political favors.

"I remember you, Miss Madigan--of course," he stammered. "Remember the
little girl, too. Crosby's flame, eh?"

Kate flushed, struck dumb with the insult, and her black-gray eyes
gleamed handsomely with anger. After getting herself up in her most
mature fashion to be mistaken for Sissy!

"Why, Mr. Pemberton," exclaimed Miss Madigan, flustered by propinquity
to greatness, "this is Kate, the Miss Madigan who--for whom--"

"Oh, excuse me." Pemberton sat rubbing his chin and silently blinking at
the Miss Madigan for whom his influence had been invoked. She felt he
was weighing her youth and inexperience against the thing that had been
asked for her. And the Madigan in her fiercely resented it; was tempted
to confirm his doubts by a saucy flippancy that would relieve her
impatience of a false position. But there was that other Madigan in her
to be reckoned with, that new one, on the reverse of whose shining,
romantic shield a plain, dull, tenacious sense of duty was slowly
spelling itself into legibility.

"Kate's really very clever, Mr. Pemberton," said Kate's aunt, tactfully;
and the girl's teeth clicked together, in her effort to control her
irritation. "And in some ways she is much older than her years. She will
graduate, you know, this year at the head of her class; she passed first
in the examination, and really, in a family where there are so many
girls--"

"Yes, yes, I know," interrupted the great man. "You told me all about
that, and I--"

"And you've had time to realize just how extraordinary a creature I am
and how pitiful a case ours is! Am I too brilliant altogether to be
wasted