out.
What is being said about me?"

"Horrid things--not to me, of course. They'd better not be! But--Mrs.
Herbert came to see me yesterday afternoon. She wasn't at the luncheon
and Grace got the first rap, but most of her hatefulness she took out
on you. She's worse than a germ disease. I always feel I ought to be
disinfected after I see her. If she were a leper she wouldn't be
allowed at large, and she's much more deadly. People like that ought
to be locked up."

"What did she tell you about me?" I smiled in Kitty's flushed face,
smiled also at the remembrance of Alice Herbert's would-be cut some
time ago, but I did not mention it. "You oughtn't to be so hard on
her. She's crazy."

"But crazy people are dangerous. A mosquito can kill a king, and a
king has to be careful about mosquitoes. I'm more afraid of people
than I am of insects. If you could only label them--"

"People label themselves. What did Alice Herbert say about me?"

"First, of course, how strange it was that you should care to live in
Scarborough Square, especially as you were a person who held yourself
so aloof from--"

"People like her. I do. What else did she say?"

"That you met all sorts of people, had all sorts to come and see you.
A trained nurse who is with a sick friend of her aunt's told her she'd
heard you let a--let a bad woman come in your house." Kitty's voice
trailed huskily. "She said it would ruin you if things like that got
out. I told her it was a lie--it wasn't so."

"It was so." I held Kitty's eyes, horror-filled and unbelieving. "She
stayed with Mrs. Mundy a week. Yesterday she went away to the
mountains--to die."

For a moment longer Kitty stared at me, and in her face crept deep and
crimson color. "You mean--that you let a--a woman like that come in
your house and stay a week? Mean--"

For a long time we sat by the fire in Kitty's sitting-room with its
rose-colored hangings, its mellow furnishings, its soft burning logs on
their brass andirons, its elusive fragrance of fresh flowers, and
unsparingly I told her what all women should know. In the twilight
that of which I talked made pictures come and go that gave her
understanding never glimpsed before, and, slipping on her knees, she
buried her face, shudderingly, in my lap.

"Is it I, Danny? Is it women like me who could do something and
don't?" she said, after a long, long while. "Oh, Danny, is it I?"

[Illustration: "Is it I, Danny?