Ethelinda made no comment for a moment, but presently asked in a strained tone, “Did you have any doubts of Miss Berkeley’s claims?  Is that why you looked her up in the peerage?”

“No,” said Mary, honestly.  “I was looking for my own name.  But there wasn’t a single Ware in it.  And then”—­she couldn’t resist this thrust, especially as she felt it was a part of the missionary work she had undertaken—­“I looked for Hurst, too, as the girls said you had a crest.”

“Well?” came the question, a trifle defiantly.

“It’s not in the Peerage.”

Ethelinda drew herself up haughtily as if she disdained an explanation, yet felt forced to make one.  “It is not my father’s crest I use,” she announced.  “It came from back in my mother’s family.”

“Oh!” said Mary, with significant emphasis.  “I see!” Then she added cheerfully, “I could have one, too, on a count like that, way back among my great-grandmothers.  But I wouldn’t have any real right to it.  You have to be in the direct line of descent, you know, and it is silly for us Americans to try to hang on by a hair to the main trunk of the family tree, when all the world knows we belong on the outside branches.”

There was no answer to this and the dressing proceeded in a silence as profound as the morning’s, until Mary saw that Ethelinda was struggling in a frantic effort to free herself from the hooks of her dress which had caught in her hair.

“Wait,” she called, hurrying to the rescue.  “Let me hook it for you.  What a perfect dream of a gown it is!” she added in frank admiration, as she deftly fastened it up the back.  “It looks like the kind in the fairy tales that are woven out of moon-beams.  Here, let me fix your hair, where the hooks pulled it loose.”

She tucked in the straggling locks with a few soft pats and touches which, with the compliment, mollified Ethelinda a trifle, in spite of her resentment over the former speech.  But it still rankled, and she could not forbear saying a little spitefully, “Thanks!  What a soft, light touch you have.  Quite like a maid I had last year.  By the way, her name was Mary.  And it was awfully funny.  It happened at that time that every maid in the house was named that, and whenever mamma called ‘Mary’ five or six of them would come running.  I used to tell my maid that if I had as common a name as that I’d change it.”

Something in the way she said it set Mary’s teeth on edge.  She had never known any one before who purposely said disagreeable things.  She often said them herself in her blundering, impetuous way, but was heartily sorry as soon as they were uttered.  Now for the first time in her life she wanted to retaliate by saying the meanest thing she could think of.  So she answered, hotly, “Oh, I don’t know.  I’d rather be named Mary than a name that means noble snake, like Ethelinda.”

“Who told you it means that?” was Ethelinda’s astonished demand.  “I don’t believe it.”