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RV 238 straight edges, was sharpened by a new distress.

"It's very kind of you to come, Nona—" she began in her clear painstaking voice.

"Oh, nonsense, Aggie! Do drop all that. Of course I know what it's about."

Aggie turned noticeably paler; but her training as a hostess prevailing over her emotion, she pushed forward a gilt chair. "Do sit down." She placed herself in an adjoining sofa corner. Overhead, Aggie's grandmother, in a voluted gilt frame, held a Brussels lace handkerchief in her hand, and leaned one ruffled elbow on a velvet table-cover fringed with knobby tassels.

"You say you know—" Aggie began.

"Of course."

"Stanley—he's told you?"

Nona's nerves were beginning to jump and squirm like a bundle of young vipers. Was she going to be able to stand much more of these paralyzing preliminaries?

"Oh, yes: he's told me."

Aggie dropped her lids and stared down at her narrow white hands. Then a premonitory twitch ran along her lips and drew her forehead into little wrinkles of perplexity.

"I don't want you to think I've any cause of complaint against Stanley—none whatever. There has never been a single unkind word We've always lived together on the most perfect terms"