She flushed to a lovely pink.

"Oh, you know what I mean. I don't have to explain."

"You mean that in my position in the household it will be for me to—to keep out of his way?"

"It's you who put it like that, dear Miss Adare—"

"But it's the way you want me to put it?"

"Well, if I admit that it is?"

"Then I don't think I care for the place."

"What?"

I stated my position more simply.

"If I'm to have nothing to do with your brother, Mrs. Rossiter, I don't want to go."

In the audacity of this response she saw something that amused her, for, snatching the dress from my hand, she ran with it into the next room, laughing.

During the following winter in New York and the early summer of the next year in Newport I saw a good deal of Mr. Hugh Brokenshire, but never with any violent restriction on the part of Mrs. Rossiter. I say violent with intention, for she did intervene when she could do so. Only once did I hear that she knew he was kind to me, and that was from Larry Strangways. It was an observation he had overheard as it passed from Mrs. Rossiter to her husband, and which, in the spirit of our silent camaraderie, he thought it right to hand along.

"I can't be responsible for Hugh!" Mrs. Rossiter had said. "He's old enough to look after himself. If he wants a row with father he must have it; and he seems to me in a fair way to get it. If he does it will be his own fault; it won't be Miss Adare's."

Fortified by this acquittal, I went on my way as quietly as I could, though I cannot say I was free from perturbation.

Perturbation caught me like a whiff of wind as I saw Larry Strangways deflect from his course across the lawn and come in my direction. 

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