e length of
Main Street and back, and that was enough for me."

"How did John Culver happen to say anything about that? How come it you
were talking to him?"

"I'd asked him to hire me as a waitress," said Rose.

"And I reckon," said Miss Gibbons, "that he told you he kept a
respectable hotel. He may have put some frills on it, but that's close
enough to go on, isn't it?"

Rose nodded. In her relief at finding her situation so well understood,
she was turning a little limp.

"Why did you come to me?" Miss Gibbons demanded. "He never would have
thought of sending you here."

Rose braced up once more and told about her conversation with Judge
Granger.

This time the milliner heard her through.

"And so the judge sent you to me," she said, when Rose had finished. "I
suppose that was his fool idea of being funny. He thought it was a
chance to get me poison mad."

Rose nodded a little wearily.

"Yes," she said, "I suppose that was it."

The milliner shot out a sharp glance at her. "Sit down," she said
bruskly, and nodded to a chair.

Rose didn't much want to. Her instinct was to stay on her feet until
she'd won her battle, and her fatigue only heightened it. But Miss
Gibbons had given her an order rather than an invitation, and she obeyed
it.

The older woman didn't sit down.

"Harvey Granger," she said thoughtfully, "will never forgive me as long
as he lives, for not thinking he's a great man. That's just ridiculous,
of course, because I know Harve. Years ago, you see,--so long ago that
everybody's forgotten it--my father was the big man down in this part of
the state. He was a circuit judge, when circuit judges amounted to
something, and he was one of the best of them. But he was a fool about
money and he got mixed up in things--and died. I was twenty-five years
old then, and I took to hats.

"Well, Harve Granger was my father's law-clerk before father was elected
judge. I used to see him night and morning. And, as I say, I know him
all the way through. He knows I know him, and that's what he can't get
over."

There was a little silence when she finished; a silence Rose's instinct
told her not to break. Presently the little woman wheeled around on her.

"Well," she said, "you came to me anyway, though you saw the judge
meant it for a joke. Why did you do that?"

"I don't know," said Rose. "I thought I would."

"And you haven't told me yet," said Miss Gibbons, "that you're really
straight and resp