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Rh self off, with a look of pique on his cold Northern face. Teresa yawned, got herself a cigarette and her volume of Arabian Nights, and made herself comfortable in a long chair between lamp and fire.

But she did not begin reading immediately. She lay thinking vaguely of the incidents of the day. She was tired, and her thoughts had the incoherence of dreams. Gerald Dallas and Miss Carruthers were oddly mixed up in them. She remembered a visit she had paid Miss Carruthers, when the old maid had taken her up into a bedroom, and showed her a curious collection of treasures—rolls upon rolls of silk and chiffon, boxes of lace, of long delicate gloves, and silk stockings, jewelled hair ornaments, and filmy scarves. All these, were dimly destined to the adornment of a pathetic, withered person, and yet would probably never be worn; for something prevented Miss Carruthers from actually appearing in them. She usually wore drabs and faded yellows in public, but her passion for the accumulation of these frivolities of a pretty woman's toilette furnished the main pleasure of her life. The emerald and pearl pendant had now doubtless been added to her hoard. Aunt Sophy would have held her sternly responsible; Aunt Sophy knew exactly where to draw the line of moral responsibility. She had drawn it in Gerald's case, too, with unhesitating hand.