ter's rooms. So
much was done to make the servants comfortable and happy. Nobody had
ever spoken crossly to one in my mother's house----"And, Oh, Mrs.
Mannering, I feel so low and ashamed to have made so much trouble for
you and Mr. Archie."

That was the first mention of my name.

"My dear Hilda, you mustn't feel ashamed because you've had a romance."

"Oh, it has been a sort of romance, hasn't it, Mrs. Mannering? But I
never--never should have let it all come out. Because now I'll have to
go away, and never even see him ever any more. I never should have let
it come out, but I couldn't help it. And him always so kind and
polite, and never once guessing all these years!"

Now my mother had not gone into that interview without a definite plan.
She had heard that the Fultons--of all the people in this world whom it
might have been!--were being abandoned by their waitress, and already
by a brisk use of the telephone my mother had secured the place for
Hilda.

It's a wonder that Hilda did not burst out laughing or screaming when
she heard into whose service she was to go. I don't think she hated
Lucy--yet. But for a woman who loved a man to take a place with the
woman the man loved must have struck her as the most grotesque of
propositions. But what could she do? Loyal to me, and to my secret,
she wasn't going to give me away to my mother.

"But," she protested, "Mr. Archie goes so much to that house!"

"But now," said my mother, "don't you see, he won't go so much."

Indeed the dear manager felt that she had killed two birds with one
stone. Lucy had a good place, and from now on there would be in the
Fultons' house a living reason why a man of tact (like her beloved
son!) should keep away. Alas, mother, there were other living reasons
in that house which should have served to keep me away, and didn't.

I heard from my mother of the arrangement and was troubled. For once
in her life of smoothing out other people's lives she had blundered
seriously. Her measures had in them only this of success: that I found
many excuses for not taking meals in the Fultons' house, and from that
time forward saw Hilda very seldom. My mother gave her a lot of
clothes, and quite a lot of money, I suppose, and the poor child for a
while dropped out of sight. But not out of mind, I can tell you; for
it worried me sick to feel that she was always in Lucy's house,
watching and listening when she could.

I had not at thi