things in the world. She sometimes said so with touching earnestness.

"She told me"--Mr. Brockton stumbled slightly--"that there wasn't any
one else."

"There isn't. She has her train--she's enormously admired--but there
is no one in whom she is sentimentally interested. And Aunt Jessie
says it was so all the time they were in Europe."

"Wasn't there ever?" he demanded.

"My dear Mr. Brockton, Millicent is twenty-nine, as you reminded her,
and she's a normal woman! Of course there have been some ones--her
music-master at fourteen, I dare say, and an actor at sixteen, and a
young curate at eighteen--oh, of course I'm jesting. But I suppose she
was somewhat like other girls. She was engaged at nineteen--and he
must have been quite twenty-three! No, I should dismiss all jealousy
of her past if I were you."

"Engaged?"

Mrs. Dinsmore wondered suddenly if she had been wise, after all, to
admit that widely known fact.

"Oh yes, a bread-and-butter engagement. My uncle was notoriously
inadequate in all practical affairs; he was a scholar and something of
a recluse and the most charming gentleman I ever saw, but a child in
worldly matters,--a child! It ended, you see."

"How did it end?"