automobile," she confided proudly. "It was one of those billion dollar
French cars. And I lived just round the corner from the drug-store. But
we used to ride home by way of--New Hampshire!"

Almost imperceptibly her breath began to quicken. "Gee! Those nights!"
she muttered. "Rain or shine, moon or thunder,--tearing down those
country roads at forty miles an hour, singing, hollering, whispering!
It was him that taught me to do my hair like this--instead of all the
cheap rats and pompadours every other kid in town was wearing," she
asserted, quite irrelevantly; then stopped with a quick, furtive glance
of suspicion towards both her listeners and mouthed her way delicately
back to the beginning of her sentence again. "It was _he_ that taught me
to do my hair like this," she repeated with the faintest possible
suggestion of hauteur.

For one reason or another along the exquisitely chaste curve of her
cheek a narrow streak of red began to show again.

"And he went away very sudden at the last," she finished hurriedly. "It
seems he was married all the time." Blandly she turned her wonderful
face to the caressing light. "And--I hope he goes to Hell!" she added
perfectly simply.

With a little gasp of astonishment, shock, suspicion, distaste, Helene
Churchill reached out an immediate conscientious hand to her.

"Oh, Zillah!" she began. "Oh, poor Zillah dear! I'm so--sorry! I'm so--"

Absolutely serenely, through a mask of insolence and ice, Zillah
Forsyth ignored the proffered hand.