Bess looked up, interested.

"I thought I wrote you when I sent the other things. None of us did
it. It was Mrs. Rolfston."

"Mrs. Rolfston?"

"Certainly. She was here one day, when we were making up a lot of
things for you, and said that she'd make something herself to go with
the next lot. A week or two later she brought me that tie, and I
inclosed it. Pretty, isn't it?"

"Very pretty."

The young man on the grass was thinking.

He knew Mrs. Rolfston slightly; knew her as the wife of a well-to-do
man who saw but little of her husband.

Daughter of a poor man of none too good character in the little town,
she had grown up shrewd, self-possessed, and with much animal beauty.
At twenty she had married a man of fifty, a builder of steamboats, a
red-faced, riotous brute, who had bought her as he would buy a horse,
and to whom she went easily because she wanted the position money
gives. Within a week he had disgusted her to such an extent that she
almost repented of the bargain. Within a year, he had tired of her and
was openly unfaithful in every port upon the lakes, a vigorous, lawless
debauchee. His ship-building was done in a distant port, and he rarely
visited his wife. He rather feared her, mastiff as he was, for here
was the keener intelligence, and her moods, at times, were desperate as