o her mother from downtown at three, and
said that Mr. George Plum and the ardent vocalist, Clairdyce, had just
left his office. They had not called in company, however, but
coincidentally; and each had a copy of _The North End Daily Oriole_,
already somewhat worn with folding and unfolding. Mr. Clairdyce's
condition was one of desperate calm, Florence's father said, but Mr.
Plum's agitation left him rather unpresentable for the street, though he
had finally gone forth with his hair just as he had rumpled it, and with
his hat in his hand. They wished the truth, they said: Was it true or
was it not true? Mr. Atwater had told them that he feared Julia was
indeed engaged, though he knew nothing of her fiance's previous marriage
or marriages, or of the number of his children. They had responded that
they cared nothing about that. This man Crum's record was a matter of
indifference to them, they said. All they wanted to know was whether
Julia was engaged or not--and she was!

"The odd thing to _me_," Mr. Atwater continued to his wife, "is where on
earth Herbert could have got his story about this Crum's being a
widower, and divorced, and with all those children. Do you know if
Julia's written any of the family about these things and they haven't
told the rest of us?"

"No," said Mrs. Atwater. "I'm sure she hasn't. Every letter she's
written to any of us has passed all through the family, and I know I've
seen every one of 'em. She's never said anything about him at all,
except that he was a lawyer. I'm sure _I_ can't imagine where Herbert
got his awful information; I never thought he was the kind of boy to
just make up such things out of whole cloth."

Florence, sitting quietly in a chair near by, with a copy of "Sesame and
Lilies" in her lap, listened to her mother's side of this conversation
with an expression of impersonal interest; and if she could have
realized how completely her parents had forgotten (naturally enough) the
details of their first rambling discussion of Julia's engagement, she
might really have felt as little alarm as she showed.

"Well," said Mr. Atwater, "I'm glad _our_ branch of the family isn't
responsible. That's a comfort, anyhow, especially as people are reading
copies of Herbert's dreadful paper all up and down the town, my clerk
says. He tells me that over at the Unity Trust Company, where young
Murdock Hawes is cashier, they only got hold of one copy, but typewrote
it and multigraphed it, an