“Where do you think I have been?” asked Miss Payne, untying her bonnet strings as she sat down.

“How can I guess?  Your wanderings are various.”

“I went to see Mrs. Needham, and I am very glad I did.  I found her just bursting with curiosity.  All sorts of reports have got about respecting your cousin and your loss of fortune, and she was enchanted to get the whole truth from me.  Besides, she has just been applied to by the friends of a girl only sixteen to find a proper chaperon.  She is full of enthusiasm about us both, and begged me, and you too, to dine with her the day after to-morrow to meet a Miss Bradley, the relative or friend of the sixteen-year-old.  We are to look at each other, and are supposed to be in total ignorance of each other’s identity.  Mrs. Needham delights in small plots and transparent mysteries.”

“And why am I to go?” asked Katherine, carelessly.

“To make a fourth, and talk to the hostess while I discourse with Miss Bradley.”

“Very well; I will come.”

“Any further news to-day?”

“Not a word; not a line.”

CHAPTER XXVII.

A DINNER AT MRS. NEEDHAM’S.

Mrs. Needham was a very important at personage in her own estimation, and very popular with a large circle of acquaintances.  Most of them thought she was a widow, and only a few old friends were aware that away in a distant colony Needham masculine was hiding his diminished head from creditors of various kinds and penalties of many descriptions, not in penitence, but with as much of enjoyment as could be extracted from the simple materials of antipodean life.  Having taken with him all the cash he could lay hands upon, his deserted wife was left to do battle alone on a small income which was her own, and fortunately secured to her on her marriage.

She was much too energetic to sit still when she might work and earn money.  The editor of a provincial paper, a friend of early days, gave her space in his columns for a weekly letter, and an introduction to a London confrere.  On this slender foundation she built her humble fortunes.  There were, in truth, few happier women in London.  Brimful of interest in all the undertakings (and their name was legion) in which she was concerned, kind and unselfish, though quite free from sentiment, her life was full of movement and color.  She had an enormous capacity for absorbing the marvellous, quite uninfluenced by the natural shrewdness with which she acted in all ordinary matters.  In a bright surface way she was clever and full of ideas—­ideas which others took up and fructified—­from which Mrs. Needham herself derived no benefit beyond the pleasure of imparting them.  She was constantly taken in by barefaced impostors, yet at times, and in an accidental way, hit on wonderfully accurate estimates of persons whom the general public credited with widely different qualities.