ask?"

"Oh, certainly. There's no reason why I shouldn't say, for I wish you to
be very frank with me. I ask because there are two young ladies in this
house; and, in a certain way, I have to take the place of a mother
to them. I needn't explain why; you know all the people here, and
you understand. I have nothing to say about them, but I should not be
speaking to you now if they were not all rather helpless people. They do
not know the world they have come to live in here, and they cannot help
themselves or one another. But you do know it, Mr. Beaton, and I am sure
you know just how much or how little you mean by coming here. You are
either interested in one of these young girls or you are not. If you
are, I have nothing more to say. If you are not--" Mrs. Mandel continued
to smile, but the smile had grown more perfunctory, and it had an icy
gleam.

Beaton looked at her with surprise that he gravely kept to himself. He
had always regarded her as a social nullity, with a kind of pity, to be
sure, as a civilized person living among such people as the Dryfooses,
but not without a humorous contempt; he had thought of her as Mandel,
and sometimes as Old Mandel, though she was not half a score of years
his senior, and was still well on the sunny side of forty. He reddened,
and then turned an angry pallor. "Excuse me again, Mrs. Mandel. Do you
ask this from the young ladies?"

"Certainly not," she said, with the best temper, and with something in
her tone that convicted Beaton of vulgarity, in putting his question of
her authority in the form of a sneer. "As I have suggested, they would
hardly know how to help themselves at all in such a matter. I have no
objection to saying that I ask it from the father of the young ladies.
Of course, in and for myself I should have no right to know anything
about your affairs. I assure you the duty of knowing isn't very
pleasant." The little tremor in her clear voice struck Beaton as
something rather nice.

"I can very well believe that, Mrs. Mandel," he said, with a dreamy
sadness in his own. He lifted his eyes and looked into hers. "If I told
you that I cared nothing about them in the way you intimate?"

"Then I should prefer to let you characterize your own conduct in
continuing to come here for the year past, as you have done, and tacitly
leading them on to infer differently." They both mechanically kept up
the fiction of plurality in speaking of Christine, but there was no
doubt