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"He married me on the strict QT at the Registrar's at Cookham," goes on Lessie, her painted mouth twisting, "a fortnight before he was ordered out on the Staff. We'd been friends for over a year.

Breakfast over, the whole family made preparations for going to Sunday school. Preparations always went on peacefully until it came to combing hair. The older members of the family endured the ordeal very well; but little "Lessie" always screamed as if she was being tortured, and James Henry received many kicks and scratches from Belton before he was through combing Belton's hair.

"Beautiful Beau, who never went back on a man, or told the truth to a woman! that's his character, and it pretty well sizes him up!" Lessie stops, gasping and out of breath, the plump, jewelled hand clutching at her heaving bosom.

"Ought to be kept under glass, then," comments Lessie, "as a model husband. Now, my poor " Lynette interrupts, with angry emphasis: "I will not hear Dr. Saxham mentioned in the same breath with Lord Beauvayse!" "He's dead let him be!" Beau's widow snarls, her mouth twisting.

On Thursday he was killed, and later nearly a year after my marriage to Dr. Saxham I found out the truth." Lessie shrugs her pretty shoulders, but the face and voice of the speaker have brought conviction. She realises that if she has been injured, her rival has suffered equal wrong. "You were pretty quick in taking on another man, it strikes me. But that's not my business. You say you found out?"

And the editor of the Keyhole, a certain weekly journal of caterings for the curious, will gladly publish any little anecdote which will serve the dual purpose of amusing his readers and keeping the name of Miss Lessie Lavigne before the public eye. "How did you enjoy the performance of the lady who played the part?" Lynette ponders, and her fine brows knit.

Lynette rises, and stands beside Lessie, looking down in painful hesitation at the blinking, reddened eyelids and the working mouth. "I have guests waiting for me at the Plas. And would it not be wise of you to go home and lie down?" The words, for some obscure reason or other, convey an intolerable sting.

The swollen face with the wet eyes is averted, or Lessie might be roused to fresh resentment by the tenderness of pity that is dawning in Lynette's. "You have suffered cruelly, Lady Beauvayse; but I was not knowingly or wilfully to blame. Please try to believe it!" Lessie blows her small nose with a toot of incredulity, and says through an intervening wad of damp lace-edged cambric: "Go on!"

The man who had married Miss Mildare could hardly be expected to join with heartiness in deploring the untimely decease of his predecessor. "Not that it could have come to anything between poor Toby and her if the dear old chap had lived," reflected Bingo, and wondered if the Doctor knew about about Lessie?

You're a lady, born and bred," owns Lessie grudgingly, "and I was a jobbing tailor's kid, that worked to keep myself and other folks as a baby imp in Pantomime, while you were being coddled up and kept in cotton-wool!" She ends with a husky laugh and a shrug of the shoulders.