blood in the whole lot of them,” her voice rose on a formidable and powerful note of unrelenting judgment. “—Everyone in Society knows that old Steve Buchanan, that girl’s grandfather, was a thorough-going rotter,” she bit the word off almost viciously. “His reputation was so bad that most people wouldn’t even have him in their house—that was the reason he spent the last twenty years of his life in France: he had become an outcast over here, no one would speak to him—he had to get out!—But! Heavens! A stable-boy!” she laughed again, and this time her laugh was almost hard and ugly. “What a blow to Myra—after all her years of scheming and contriving to get Timmy Wilson and his millions into the family!… I knew it! I knew it!” she shook her head with formidable, obstinate conviction. “I could have told them long ago they’d have trouble with that girl before they were done with her! There’s bad blood there! Of course, it was bound to happen, sooner or later, anyway—Myra’s a fool of the first water: she never had the brains of a rabbit. But to think!—Heavens! what a let-down after all her scheming: a stable-boy! I bet she had a fit!”
“Still,” suggested a young man named Howard, at this propitious moment, in his mincing, lisping, and effeminately mannered tone, “—as Irene Cartwright said, it was the only original thing that Ellen Rossiter ever did, and it was rather a pity to break the romance off…. I thought,” he went on casually, “that the story they told about the ostler was rather touching—asking her to send his letters back, you know!”
“No!” cried Mrs. Pierce in an astounded tone. “Did he?… Well!” she went on eagerly. “And did she send them?… Go on, Howard!”
“But, of course,” said Howard. “And the wedding-ring, and everything else that he had given her…. I read the letter that he wrote her: it was really too pathetic—he said he was going with another girl—a housemaid, I believe—and he didn’t want it to get out that he had paid attentions to someone else….’I have spoke it all over with my mother,’he said,” Howard quoted drolly, “’and she thinks the same as me, you ought to let me have them back’”—
“Oh, Howard!” Mrs. Pierce shrieked faintly. “You know he didn’t! Simply priceless!”
For a moment her splendid, even teeth flashed brilliantly in the moonlight: she lifted the long cigarette-holder in her hand and took a long, deliberate puff: the fragrant, acrid smoke of Turkish tobacco coiled
