room, garnished with wonderful hats and fashionable furs. She had none
of a Frenchwoman's gift for ignoring social differences, and she had the
uneasy pride that is rare in a Celt, although she had all a Celt's taste
for refinement and show and glitter. Miss Carew sat more and more
stiffly at the tea-table, until she confided frankly to Molly--

"My dear, I am too old, and I am simply in the way. It is just too late
in my life, you see, after all the years of governess work. Of course,
if my beloved father had lived, I should never have been a governess.
But as it is, I think I need not appear when you have visitors, except
now and then."

Molly acquiesced after enough protest, chiefly because she had begun to
wonder if it would be quite easy to have an occasional _tête-à-tête_
with men friends without having to suggest to Miss Carew to retire
gracefully. She had that morning heard that Sir Edmund Grosse was in
London, but she had no reason, she told herself, to suppose that he knew
where she was.

Meanwhile, she was exceedingly angry at finding that Adela Delaport
Green was giving her version of her relations with Molly in the season
to all her particular friends. Molly could not find out details, but she
more than suspected that the fact of her being Madame Danterre's
daughter made up part of Adela's story, although she could not imagine
how she came to know who her mother was.

Molly would probably have brooded to a morbid degree over these angry
suspicions, but that another side of life was soon pressed upon her, a
new source of human interest, in the dying husband of a charwoman.