"You are saying that to keep me from feeling badly. But I ought to feel
badly--I _wish_ to feel badly. I suppose he said that it wasn't worth
anything now."

"Something of that sort," Hewson helplessly admitted.

"Very well, then, I will buy it for whatever he chooses to ask!" With the
precipitation which characterized all her actions, Miss Hernshaw rose
from the chair in which she had been provisionally sitting, pushed an
electric button in the wall, swirled away to the other side of the room,
unlocked the door behind which those sounds had subsided, and flinging it
open, said, "You can come out, Mrs. Hock; I've rung for breakfast."

Mrs. Rock came smoothly forth, with her vague eyes wandering over every
other object in the room, till they rested upon Hewson, directly before
her. Then she gave him her hand, and asked, with a smile, as if taking
him into the joke. "Well, has Rosalie had it out with you?"

"I have had it out with him, Mrs. Rock," Miss Hernshaw answered, "and I
will tell you all about it later. Now I want my breakfast."




XII.


Hewson ate the meal before him, and it was a very good one, as from time
to time he noted, in a daze which was as strange a confusion of the two
consciousnesses as he had ever experienced. Whatever the convention was