irls ran, making
mouths at Boyne over their shoulders. He scorned to notice them; but he
was obliged to report the misconduct of Lottie, who began making eyes at
the Dutch officers as soon as she could feel that Ellen was safely off
her hands. She was the more exasperating and the more culpable to Boyne,
because she had asked him to walk up the beach with her, and had then
made the fraternal promenade a basis of operations against the Dutch
military. She joined her parents in ignoring Boyne's complaints, and
continued to take credit for all the pleasant facts of the situation;
she patronized her family as much for the table d'hote at luncheon as
for the comfort of their rooms. She was able to assure them that there
was not a Cook's tourist in the hotel, where there seemed to be nearly
every other kind of fellow-creature. At the end of the first week she
had acquaintance of as many nationalities as she could reach in their
native or acquired English, in all the stages of haughty toleration,
vivid intimacy, and cold exhaustion. She had a faculty for getting
through with people, or of ceasing to have any use for them, which was
perhaps her best safeguard in her adventurous flirting; while the simple
aliens were still in the full tide of fancied success, Lottie was sick
of them all, and deep in an indiscriminate correspondence with her young
men in Tuskingum.

The letters which she had invited from these while still in New York
arrived with the first of those readdressed from the judge's London
banker. She had more letters than all the rest of the family together,
and counted a half-dozen against a poor two for her sister. Mrs. Kenton
cared nothing about Lottie's letters, but she was silently uneasy about
the two that Ellen carelessly took. She wondered who could be writing to
Ellen, especially in a cover bearing a handwriting altogether strange to
her.

"It isn't from Bittridge, at any rate," she said to her husband, in the
speculation which she made him share. "I am always dreading to have her
find out what Richard did. It would spoil everything, I'm afraid, and
now everything is going so well. I do wish Richard hadn't, though, of
course, he did it for the best. Who do you think has been writing to
her?"

"Why don't you ask her?"

"I suppose she will tell me after a while. I don't like to seem to be
following her up. One was from Bessie Pearl, I think."

Ellen did not speak of her letters to her mother, and after wa