“Well?” said Henry, interrogatively.

“All right,” responded Meeks.  “What it is all about beats me.  The stuff wouldn’t hurt a babe in arms, unless it gave it indigestion.  Your boarder hasn’t insanity in his family, has he?”

“Not that I know of,” replied Henry.  Then he repeated Meeks’s comment.  “It beats me,” he said.

When Henry re-entered the house Sylvia looked at him.  “What were you and Mr. Meeks talking about out in the street?” she asked.

“Nothing,” replied Henry, lying as a man may to a woman or a child.

“He’s in there with her,” whispered Sylvia.  “They went in there the minute Mr. Meeks and you went out.”  Sylvia pointed to the best parlor and looked miserably jealous.

“Well,” said Henry, tentatively.

“If they’ve got anything to say I don’t see why they can’t say it here,” said Sylvia.

“The door is open,” said Henry.

“I ain’t going to listen, if it is, and you know I can’t hear with one ear,” said Sylvia.  “Of course I don’t care, but I don’t see why they went in there.  What were you and Mr. Meeks talking about, Henry?”

“Nothing,” answered Henry, cheerfully, again.

Chapter XIII

Rose Fletcher had had a peculiar training.  She had in one sense belonged to the ranks of the fully sophisticated, who are supposed to swim on the surface of things and catch all the high lights of existence, like bubbles, and in another sense it had been very much the reverse.  She might, so far as one side of her character was concerned, have been born and brought up in East Westland, as her mother had been before her.  She had a perfect village simplicity and wonder at life, as to a part of her innermost self, which was only veneered by her contact with the world.  In part she was entirely different from all the girls in the place, and the difference was really in the grain.  That had come from her assimilation at a very tender age with the people who had had the care of her.  They had belonged by right of birth with the most brilliant social lights, but lack of money had hampered them.  They blazed, as it were, under ground glass with very small candle-powers, although they were on the same shelf with the brilliant incandescents.  Rose’s money had been the main factor which enabled them to blaze at all.  Otherwise they might have still remained on the shelf, it is true, but as dark stars.

Rose had not been sent away to school for two reasons.  One reason was Miss Farrel’s, the other originated with her caretakers.  Miss Farrel had a jealous dread of the girl’s forming one of those erotic friendships, which are really diseased love-affairs, with another girl or a teacher, and the Wiltons’ reason was a pecuniary one.  Among the Wiltons’ few assets was a distant female relative of pronounced accomplishments and educational attainments, who was even worse off financially than they.  It had