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 does Ellen. They're both stuck up. They think there's nothing good enough for them in the Town."

"You'd think," rejoined Mrs. Seton, "to see Ellen in her homemade clothes that she was a princess!"

A fierce resentment, bordering upon savagery, colored her voice. In the course of the conversation the fat, complacent woman became transformed into a spiteful, witch-like creature. And in the brain of Clarence there echoed a soft voice which said, "Ah, the Setons! To be sure, I know who they are but I don't know them," dismissing them all quite easily, without resentment, without savagery, even without thought, forgetting in the next moment their very existence.

And then the lightning struck.

The shrill voice of Jimmy, impatient of results, suddenly cut the dampish air like a knife. "I know what it is! She's had a baby and she was never married! . . . She's had a baby and she was never married!" 

USK had already fallen and the black servants had placed silver candlesticks among the wreckage of the Christmas feast before the first chair was drawn back with a scraping sound in the paneled dining room of Shane's Castle.

Throughout the long dinner, Ellen sat silent and somewhat abashed, eating little, hearing nothing, not even the family talk which each year followed the same course, rambling backward into reminiscences of the Civil War and of Grandpa Barr's adventure to the Gold Coast in the Forties. Even when the old man, lost in a torrent of sweeping memories, described with flashing blue eyes and the resonant voice of youth the jungle tapestries of Panama and a terrible shipwreck off the Cocos Islands, Ellen did not raise her head. It was not these things which interested her;