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350 Her roll confessingly fixed itself. "Not enough—that's just the trouble!"

Mrs. Gracedew looked kindly curious. "What then is it?"

Cora faced the music. "Pegg."

Mrs. Gracedew stared. "Nothing else?"

"Nothing to speak of." The girl was quite candid now. "Hall."

"Nothing before?"

"Not a letter."

"Hall Pegg?" Mrs. Gracedew had winced, but she quickly recovered herself, and, for a further articulation, appeared, from delicacy, to form the sound only with her mind. The sound she formed with her lips was, after an instant, simply "Oh!"

It was to the combination of the spoken and the unspoken that Cora desperately replied. "It sounds like a hat-rack!"

"'Hall Pegg'? 'Hall Pegg'?" Mrs. Gracedew now made it, like a questionable coin, ring upon the counter. But it lay there as lead and without, for a moment, her taking it up again. "How many has your father?" she inquired instead.

"How many names?" Miss Prodmore seemed dimly to see that there was no hope in that. "He somehow makes out five."