though her own sturdy young body belonged to another world.

But Elsie was so absorbed in her happiness that she did not raise her eyes until she was almost upon them. It was Aunt Katherine’s voice that recalled her, and she stopped short a few feet from where they were standing. “Well, Elsie?”

Then at last the eyes of the destined comrades met! Kate was smiling, the corners of her mouth uptilted little wings. Her whole face spoke her delight in Elsie’s extraordinary prettiness and her own expectation of comradeship. No one could have missed what her look meant. But Elsie’s response was a strange one. Instantly the elfin smile vanished, the elfin chin became set, the pretty face and violet eyes hardened. But she took the few remaining steps forward and gave Kate her hand. In a correctly polite but delicately cool way she said, “How do you do?”

Aunt Katherine showed some chagrin at that tone. “This is your cousin, Elsie,” she said. “You are not going to stand on any formality with a cousin who has come for the express purpose of being cousinly. Dinner was announced some minutes ago. Let us go in.”

But what had happened to Kate? She hardly knew herself. She had turned sick, physically sick and faint, when Elsie had looked at her so coolly and indifferently. No one had ever treated her so in all her life before. She had had spats, of course, with her contemporaries, now and then. There had been days when either Sam or Lee or some girl in school refused to speak to her. There had been angry glances, sharp words. But she had never been treated like this. Nothing before had ever turned her sick.

As they moved down the long drawing-room and across the hall to the dining-room Kate asked herself desperately whether she had imagined it all. Could she have heard Elsie’s voice aright? Was the cool, hard glance from Elsie’s eyes insultingly indifferent? How could it be? Why should it be? What had she done? She had done just nothing at all. There was no reason in the world for Elsie to hate or despise her. And so, fortified by her reason and by the wise inner Kate that never wholly forsook her, Kate decided before they reached the dining-room that it had been imagination—partly, anyway. Elsie might not have liked her looks at first, but she had no reason to hate her.

Even so, she did not have the courage to look directly at Elsie when they were finally seated at the table. They were in high-backed carved Italian chairs at a narrow, long, black, much-oiled table. In the centre of the 

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