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 longed for her old headlong assaults and gamineries,—longed for them for their warmth and for their value as examples to learn by.

The only encouraging factor in the situation was Louise's honesty. In that respect at least there was no change. He was convinced that she had told him only one lie in her life, and that was a pathetic fib for which he was more than ready to answer to Saint Peter, since it was a by-product of the process of self-improvement Louise had undertaken, as he suspected, to do him honor. Being the first lie, it was overdone: for Miriam Cread was, of all the women he could think of, perhaps the least like a Harristown schoolmistress. He had never challenged the story, and it had never been officially contradicted. Neither Louise nor Miriam knew that one day, in looking through a bundle of old illustrated weeklies, his eye had been arrested by the photograph of a group of people in the paddock at Ascot, prominent among whom was "Rear Admiral Cread of Washington, D. C. and his daughter," chatting with a dowdy old princess of the blood royal at the very moment,—as Keble took the trouble to calculate,—when Weedgie Bruneau was alleged to have been improving her acquaintance with Miriam in a remote normal school in the Canadian northwest.

How Miriam had got to Hillside, what she had come for, and why she stopped on, were questions whose answers were of no importance. Important was the fact that Miriam's presence had had the ef-