nion that he had been summarily and severely
dealt with. "I was not in his confidence, but I could tell that
something was going to happen, and that he was very much cut up when it
all came to nothing."

"Oh, don't say that," repeated Dora, clasping her hands over her eyes,
and weeping behind them. "What good can it do except to inflict needless
torture?"

"I don't mean to reproach _you_," said Miss Franklin, a little
bewildered, but still very hot and sore. "You had nothing to do with it,
and I am sure you could not have been so heartless. Forgive me for the
reflection on your sister, who is so much thought of, whom everybody is
praising, with reason, for what she has done in nursing the sick and
poor. But young girls ought to be more careful. I don't mean to say that
she trifled with my cousin Tom--I have no right to say that--simply that
she never gave him a thought. Tom was surely deserving of a thought,"
cried Miss Franklin indignantly. "Dr. Ironside may be all very well--I
have nothing to say against him--quite the reverse. Tom is not to be
compared to him in personal appearance, and the one is a professional
man, while the other thought fit to continue a linen-draper like his
good father before him; but that is by no means to infer that Miss
Millar has chosen the better husband of the two. Girls are so
foolish--they play with fire, and never look or take it into account
where and whom it may burn. Tom Robinson deserved more respectful
treatment in Redcross. He has never been like himself since. I used to
hear him whistling and humming tunes to himself as he worked in the
office--there is no more of that, or of his hearty interest in
everything."

"Miss Franklin, it is you who are pitiless to say this to me to-night,"
panted Dora, rising against the inhumanity, and totally forgetting that
the speaker did not hold the clue which would have told her how her
words scourged her listener.

"I am not blaming _you_, Miss Dora," said the accuser again, more
bitterly than she had yet spoken. For she was in her heart accusing Dora
Millar of affectation in pretending not to be able to hear a word
against her sister, and in declining to listen to the pardonable
utterance of a reproach directed against what Miss Franklin called in
her heart Annie Millar's arrogance and callousness. Tom Robinson's
cousin was provoked, not pacified.

"I dare say Tom would never have had this wretched fever but for the
blow he got then," s