and let me know how you get
along? Write just what you need. I'll be delighted---"

"If I need anything--thank you."

"My address is Sea Gull Manor, Old Chesterton, Long Island. Shall I
write it down?"

"No, please don't trouble. I can always remember addresses. You're
really very good--to take an interest. And--and I know it must have
been hard for you to--to feel you had to speak."

It was also hard, desperately hard, for Win to pay this tribute to
Miss Rolls's unselfish interest in her moral welfare. She tried to be
grateful, to feel that her late friend's sister had been brave and
fine and unconventional thus to defend a strange girl against one so
near. But despite reason's wise counsel, her heart was hot within her.
She felt like a heathen assured by an earnest missionary that her god
was a myth.

She disliked kind Miss Rolls intensely, and would have loved to let
loose upon her somewhat obtuse head the sarcasm of which at that
moment she felt herself a past mistress. She wanted to be rich and
important and have Miss Rolls, poor and suppliant, at her mercy.
Horrified, she saw by the searchlight of her own anger dark depths of
cruelty and revenge in her own nature. She longed to rush to Peter and
tell him everything, and believe in him again, for it was hard to lose
a friend--an ideal ewe-lamb of a friend. She wished she might wake up
in her overcrowded stateroom and find that this hateful conversation
had been a dream.

But she could not do any of these brutal, silly, or impossible things.
She was not dreaming. All was true. Miss Rolls had meant well, and Mr.
Balm of Gilead did not exist. He was only Peter Rolls, a rich, selfish
fellow who thought girls who had to work fair game. His sister must
know his true inwardness. Probably she had learned through unpleasant
hushed-up experiences, through seeing skeletons unfleshed by Peter
stalk into the family cupboard.

"You ungrateful beast, behave yourself!" Miss Child boxed the ears of
her sulky ego and shook it.

The throaty quiver in the blackbird voice of the dangerous golliwog
went vibrating through Miss Rolls's conscience in a really painful
way. She felt as if she had had a shock of electricity. But, thank
goodness, the worst was over, and now that she had grasped safety (for
instinct said that the girl would not betray), she could afford to be
generous.

She reminded herself that she had acted entirely in self-defence, not
through malice, and she ha