"_I_ need him," said the girl in her sweetest tones. "He helped me once,
without a word. It helps me now to have him sitting there"--

"Without a word!" Mrs. Thorne irrepressibly supplied.

"Why can't we let her finish?" Thorne demanded, hitching his chair into an
attitude of attention.

It was impossible for Miss Benedet to take up her story in the key in which
she had left off. She began again rather flatly, allowing for the chill of
interruptions:--

"To go back to that summer; I was in my sixteenth year, and the policy
of expansion was to have begun. But father's health broke, and mama was
traveling with him and a cortege of nurses, trying one change after
another. It was duller than ever at the ranch. We sat down three at table
in a dining-room forty feet long, Aunt Isabel Dwight, Fraeulein Henschel,
and myself. Fraeulein was the resident governess. She was a great,
soft-hearted, injudicious creature, a mass of German interjections, but
she had the grand style on the piano. There had been weeks of such weather
as we are having now. Exercise was impossible till after sundown. I had
dreamed of a breath of freedom, but instead of the open door I was in
straiter bonds than ever.

"I revolted first against keeping hours. I would not get up to breakfast,
I refused to study, it was too hot to practice. I took my own head about
books, and had my first great orgy of the Russians. I used to lie beside
a chink of light in the darkened library and read while Fraeulein in the
music-room held orgies of her own. She had just missed being a great
singer; but she was a master of her instrument, and her accompaniments were