rite first to Yorkshire! Pray, am I to hear through Mrs. Theobald--a
patronizing, insolent letter like this? Have I no claim at all? Bear
witness, dear"--she choked with passion--"bear witness that for this
I'll never forgive her!"

"Oh, what is to be done?" moaned Harriet. "What is to be done?"

"This first!" She tore the letter into little pieces and scattered it
over the mould. "Next, a telegram for Lilia! No! a telegram for Miss
Caroline Abbott. She, too, has something to explain."

"Oh, what is to be done?" repeated Harriet, as she followed her mother
to the house. She was helpless before such effrontery. What awful
thing--what awful person had come to Lilia? "Some one in the hotel." The
letter only said that. What kind of person? A gentleman? An Englishman?
The letter did not say.

"Wire reason of stay at Monteriano. Strange rumours," read Mrs.
Herriton, and addressed the telegram to Abbott, Stella d'Italia,
Monteriano, Italy. "If there is an office there," she added, "we might
get an answer this evening. Since Philip is back at seven, and the
eight-fifteen catches the midnight boat at Dover--Harriet, when you go
with this, get 100 pounds in 5 pound notes at the bank."

"Go, dear, at once; do not talk. I see Irma coming back; go quickly....
Well, Irma dear, and whose team are you in this afternoon--Miss Edith's
or Miss May's?"

But as soon as she had behaved as usual to her grand-daughter, she went
to the library and took out the large atlas, for she wanted to know
about Monteriano. The name was in the smallest print, in the midst of a
woolly-brown tangle of hills which were called the "Sub-Apennines." It
was not so very far from Siena, which she had learnt at school. Past it
there wandered a thin black line, notched at intervals like a saw,
and she knew that this was a railway. But the map left a good deal to
imagination, and she had not got any. She looked up the place in "Childe
Harold," but Byron had not been there. Nor did Mark Twain visit it in
the "Tramp Abroad." The resources of literature were exhausted: she
must wait till Philip came home. And the thought of Philip made her try
Philip's room, and there she found "Central Italy," by Baedeker, and
opened it for the first time in her life and read in it as follows:--

MONTERIANO (pop. 4800). Hotels: Stella d'Italia, moderate only; Globo,
dirty. * Caffe Garibaldi. Post and Telegraph office in Corso Vittorio
Emmanuele, next to theatre. Photographs at