’That is just why I liked them so, because they were old-fashioned; it made them look like heir-looms, and showed that one had always had a family,’ Dolly said.

Grace Atherton shrugged her still plump shoulders just a little, and thought of the first call she ever made upon Dolly, when she entered through the kitchen and the lady entertained her in her working-apron!

Dolly did not look now as if she had ever seen a working-apron, and was very bright and talkative, and entertaining, and all the more so because of her husband’s silence.  He was given to moods, and sometimes aggravated his wife to desperation when he left all the conversation to her.

‘Do talk,’ she would say to him when they were alone.  ’Do talk to people and not sit so glum, with that great wrinkle between your eyes as if you were mad at something; and do laugh, too, when anybody tells anything worth laughing at, and not leave it all to me.  Why, I actually giggle at times until I feel like a fool, while you never smile or act as if you heard a word.  Look at me occasionally, and when I elevate my eyebrows—­so—­brace up and say something, if it isn’t so cunning.’

This elevating of the eyebrows and bracing up were matters of frequent occurrence, as Frank grew more and more silent and abstracted, and now after he had sat through a funny story told by Mr. St. Claire and had not even smiled, or given any sign that he heard it, he suddenly caught Dolly’s eye and saw that both eyebrows, and nose, and chin were up as marks of unusual disapprobation, for how could she guess of what he was thinking as he sat with his head bent down, and his eyes seemingly half shut.  But they came open wide enough, and his head was high enough when he saw Dolly’s frown; and turning to Mrs. Raymond he began to talk rapidly and at random.  She had just returned from Germany, where she had left her daughter, Marion, in school, and Frank asked her of the country, and if she had visited Wiesbaden, and had there met or heard of anyone by the name of Marguerite Heinrich.

Mrs. Raymond had spent some months in Wiesbaden, for it was there her daughter was at school, and she was very enthusiastic in her praises of the beautiful town.  But she had never seen or heard of Marguerite Heinrich, or of anyone by the name of Heinrich.

‘Marguerite Heinrich?’ Dolly repeated.  ’Who in the world is she—­and where did you know her?’

‘I never did know her.  I have only heard of her,’ Frank replied, again lapsing into a silence from which he did not rouse again.

He was thinking of the letter hidden away with the photograph and the book—­of the lies he had told since his deception began, and now sure it was that he had sinned beyond forgiveness.  When he was a boy he had often listened, with the blood curdling in his veins, to a story his grandmother told him with sundry embellishments, for he was not well versed in German literature, of a man—­Foster