"Why?" asked Lady Caroline, with a disconcerting directness that
was one of her most formidable characteristics.

"Oh, well, I have some things to say to them that I daresay they
will like to hear," said Ada, with a thin laugh.

Her statement was received with a silence that betokened profound
unbelief in any such probability.

"I go about a good deal among working-class women," she added.

"No one has ever said it," observed Lady Caroline, "but how
painfully true it is that the poor have us always with them."

Ada Spelvexit hastened her departure; the marred impressiveness of
her retreat came as a culminating discomfiture on the top of her
ill-fortune at the card-table. Possibly, however, the
multiplication of her own annoyances enabled her to survey
charwomen's troubles with increased cheerfulness. None of them, at
any rate, had spent an afternoon with Lady Caroline.

Francesca cut in at another table and with better fortune attending
on her, succeeded in winning back most of her losses. A sense of
satisfaction was distinctly dominant as she took leave of her
hostess. St. Michael's gossip, or rather the manner in which it
had been received, had given her a clue to the real state of
affairs, which, however slender and conjectural, at least pointed
in the desired direction. At first she had been horribly afraid
lest she should be listening to a definite announcement which would
have been the death-blow to her hopes, but as the recitation went