"I don't believe it! I don't believe it!" said Tilly Morris,
indignantly, as Dora wound up her recital of the Smithson-Smith story.

"Well, you can believe it or not; but I don't see how you can help
believing, when you remember that their name is Smith, and that they are
aunt and niece, and that the niece is fourteen or fifteen,--just as the
paper said,--and that they are staying at a summer resort not far from
Boston, and--that the niece writes to some one in South America,--think
of that!"

Tilly thought, and, flushing scarlet as she thought, she burst out,--

"Well, I don't care, I don't care. I'm not going to talk about it,
either. How many people have you--has Amy--has Agnes told?"

"I haven't told anybody but you yet. I've just come from Agnes."

"Yet! Now, look here, let me tell you something, Dora. My father, you
know, is a lawyer, and I've heard him talk a great deal when we've had
company at dinner about queer things that people did and said,--queer
things, I mean, that got them into lawsuits. One of the things that I
particularly remember was a case where a woman told things that she had
heard and things that she had fancied against a neighbor, and the
neighbor went to law about it, prosecuted the woman for slander, and
they had a horrid time. The woman's daughters had to go into court and
be examined as witnesses. Oh, it was horrid; and the worst of it was
that even though there was some truth in the stories, there were things
that were not true,--exaggerations, you know,--and so the woman was
declared guilty, and her husband had to pay a lot of money to keep her
out of prison. There was ever so much more that I've forgotten; but I