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 which picture Floss had pounced on with such rapture. "I like that one too," he agreed.

"But who is it?" Floss insisted. "I'm sure I've seen her."

Peñaverde shrugged his shoulders, and turned toward the other canvasses.

"Who should it be?" he said. "A lady who once came for tea—and stayed for breakfast."

"You sinner!" laughed Floss and held up the painting for the others to see.

With a little rush of recognition which seemed, strangely, to come froma pent-up source, Grover shouted, "It's not true!"

They looked at him in consternation. Peñaverde alone still pleasantly smiled.

"I beg your pardon," Grover apologized. "I was taken by surprise. I know the woman."

It was only the hasty rudeness he regretted, not the essential contradiction. For all he could prove to the contrary that wistfully smiling girl portrayed in a muslin frock with a great bouquet of daisies on her lap had stayed for breakfast. But even if she had,—and the thought was so repellent as to make him feel sick,—Peñaverde had absolutely no right to dispose of her, privately, much less publicly, with a caddish remark and a cynical shrug, for the girl was not the sort of girl who made a practice of coming for tea and staying for breakfast. The girl was Sophie Scantleberry.