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 touching and all that to see how busy it is putting all its poor little stock in the tiny shop-window.”

Maisie, alone in her room, was walking up and down, trailing the lavender satin, recalling with kindled eyes and red-rose cheeks every word, every look of her cavalier. How kindly he had spoken, yet how deferentially; how he had looked, how he had smiled! At dinner she supposed it was his business to talk to her. But afterwards, when she was sitting, a little forlornly and apart from the noisy chatter of the bright-plumaged house-party, how he had come straight over to her directly the gentlemen came into the drawing-room! And she felt that she had not been wanting to herself on so great an occasion.

“I know I talked well. I’m certain he saw directly that I wasn’t a silly idiot.”

She lay long awake, and, as the men trooped up the stairs, she tried to fancy that she could already distinguish his footsteps.

The letter she wrote to her mother next day was, compared to those other lying letters, as a lit chandelier to a stable-lantern. And the mother knew the difference.

“Poor darling!” she thought. “She must