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 Just before the last of the sand had trickled from the top of it into the bottom, she took them out of the boiling water and carried them to him.

She had set them before him, and was taking away the dirty plate, when the Honorable John Ruffin said gravely, "A noble type of English womanhood, one Mrs. Meeken, has informed me that you have been deceiving me, Pollyooly."

Pollyooly gasped and flushed and stood still and stared at him with frightened eyes, plucking nervously at her frock.

"I will not disguise from you that your conduct has saddened me," he said in a mournful tone, breaking the top of one of the eggs. "It is on a par with the way in which your agreeable sex has always treated me. It is a sad blow—a bitter blow, indeed. Yet I should have known that your transcendent power of grilling bacon was incompatible with sterner virtues."

"I wouldn't have done it, not to you, sir, if it had only been me. But there was the Lump. And I knew that you wouldn't think that I could do for you as well as a grown-up laundress," said Pollyooly in a trembling voice; and she wrung her hands.