“Well, I don’t believe it’s my Smiths; I believe it’s somebody else,” flashed back Tilly, with tears in her eyes and in her voice.

“Oh, very well; you can stand up for your Smiths, if you like; but you’ll find they are—­”

“Hullo!  What’s the little Smith girl done now?  Agnes, I should think you’d get tired of rattling about the Smiths,” interposed a voice here.

It was Will Wentworth’s voice; he had come out on the piazza just as the girls were passing the hall door.

Agnes started back nervously at the sight of him.  “I think you are very rude to listen and spring at anybody like this,” she said.

Will looked at her in astonishment.  “I haven’t been listening, and I didn’t spring at you,” he responded indignantly.  “I simply met you as I came out, and heard you say something about the Smiths.”

“What did you hear?” asked Agnes, quickly.

“I heard you say to Tilly, ‘Stand up for your Smiths if you like;’ and I knew by that you’d been going for Miss Peggy, and Tilly had been defending her.”  Will’s bright eyes, as he said this, suddenly observed that there was something unusually serious in the girl’s face.  “What’s the matter?” he inquired; “what’s up now?”

Agnes put her hand into her pocket, and Tilly drew in her breath with a little gasp, and braced herself to come to the defence again when Agnes should answer this question, as she fully expected her to do, by producing the cutting from the newspaper and repeating her accusations.  But when Agnes drew her hand forth, there was no slip of paper in it, and all the answer that she made to Will’s question was to say in a mocking tone,—­

“Ask Tilly; she knows all the delightful facts now about Miss Peggy and her highly respectable family.”

The decisive tone in which this was said, the significant expression of the speaker’s face as she glanced at Tilly, and Tilly’s own silence at the moment impressed Will very strongly, as Agnes fully intended; and when a minute later she slipped her hand over Dora’s arm, and went off with her toward the tennis ground, and Tilly refused to tell him what this something that was “up” was, honest Will felt convinced that the “something” must be very queer indeed.

Poor Tilly saw and understood at once the nature of the impression that Will had received; but what could she do?  It was certainly better to keep silence than to speak and tell that dreadful, dreadful story of “Smithson, alias Smith.”  Even, yes, even if it was true,—­for Tilly, spite of her vehement defence, her stout declaration of disbelief at the first, had a shuddering fear at her heart as she thought of that last paragraph about the girl of fourteen or fifteen, and of that letter to South America,—­a shuddering fear that the story might be true; but even then she would not be one of those to point a finger at poor innocent Peggy; for, whatever her father might have done, Peggy was innocent.