ur heart on,"
admitted Kate.

"I had gone places with Susette in perfect comfort. I think the
trouble was that she tried from the first to attract John. About the
time we started, he let her see plainly that all he wanted of her was
to take care of me; she was pretty and smart, so it made her furious.
She was pampered in everything, as no maid I ever had before. John is
young yet, and I think he is very handsome, and he wouldn't pay any
attention to her. You see when other boys were going to school and
getting acquainted with girls by association, even when he was a little
bit of a fellow in knee breeches, I had to let him sell papers, and
then he got into a shop, and he invented a little thing, and then a
bigger, and bigger yet, and then he went into stocks and things, and he
doesn't know anything about girls, only about sick old women like me.
He never saw what Susette was up to. You do believe that I wasn't ugly
to her, don't you?"

"You COULDN'T be ugly if you tried," said Kate.

The woman suddenly began to sob again, this time slowly, as if her
forces were almost spent. She looked to Kate for the sympathy she
craved and for the first time really saw her closely.

"Why, you dear girl," she cried. "Your face is all tear stained.
You've been crying, yourself."

"Roaring in a pillow," admitted Kate.

"But my dear, forgive me! I was so upset with that dreadful woman.
Forgive me for not having seen that you, too, are in trouble. Won't
you please tell me?"

"Of course," said Kate. "I lost my new hat."

"But, my dear! Crying over a hat? When it is so easy to get another?
How foolish!" said the woman.

"Yes, but you didn't see the hat," said Kate. "And it will be far from
easy to get another, with this one not paid for yet. I'm only one
season removed from sunbonnets, so I never should have bought it at
all."

The woman moved in bed, and taking one of Kate's long, crinkly braids,
she drew the wealth of gold through her fingers repeatedly.

"Tell me about your hat," she said.

So to humour this fragile woman, and to keep from thinking of her own
trouble, Kate told the story of her Leghorn hat and ostrich plume, and
many things besides, for she was not her usual terse self with her new
friend who had to be soothed to forgetfulness.

Kate ended: "I was all wrong to buy such a hat in the first place. I
couldn't afford it; it was foolish vanity. I'm not really
good-looking; I shouldn't have fla