it, Mrs. Forrester. I have never seen Mercedes so swayed before."

"Swayed?" Mrs. Forrester questioned.

"Oh, but yes, indeed. He managed the whole thing--and when I think that
he would in all probability never have seen the Aspreys if it had not
been for me!--Mercedes had him asked there, you know; they are very, but
very, very fashionable people, they know everybody worth knowing all
over the world. I needn't tell you that, of course. But it was all
arranged, he and Mercedes, and Lady Rose and the Marquis de
Hautefeuille, and a young American couple--with the Aspreys in the
background as universal providers--it made a little group where I was
plainly _de trop_. Mr. Drew planned everything with her. She is to have
her piano and he is to write a book under her aegis. And they are to
live in the pinewoods with the most elaborate simplicity. However, I am
sure the Adirondacks will soon bore her."

"And how soon will Mr. Drew bore her?" asked Mrs. Forrester, who had
listened to these rather pitiful revelations with, now and then, a
slight elevation of her intelligent eyebrows.

The question gave Miss Scrotton an opportunity for almost ominous
emphasis; she paused over it, holding Mrs. Forrester with a brooding
eye.

"He won't bore her," she then brought out.

"What, never? never?" Mrs. Forrester questioned gaily.

"Never, never," Miss Scrotton repeated. "He is too clever. He will keep
her interested--and uncertain."

"Well," Mrs. Forrester returned, as if this were all to the good, "it is
a comfort to think that the poor darling has found a distraction."

"You feel it that? I wish I could. I wish I could feel it anything but
an infatuation. If only he weren't so much the type of a great woman's
folly; if only he weren't so of the region of whispers. It isn't like
our wonderful Sir Alliston; one sees her there standing high on a
mountain peak with the winds of heaven about her. To see her with Mr.
Drew is like seeing her through some ambiguous, sticky fog. Oh, I can't
deny that it has all made me very, very unhappy." Tears blinked in Miss
Scrotton's eyes.

Mrs. Forrester was kind, she leaned forward and patted Miss Scrotton's
hand, she smiled reassuringly, and she refused, for a moment, to share
her anxiety. "No, no, no," she said, "you are troubling yourself quite
needlessly, my dear Eleanor. Mercedes is amusing herself and the young
man is an interesting young man; she has talked to me and written to me
about