“I’ve just told you,” said Ellen, her face setting.  “She sent for me.”

“Why didn’t you say you were in bed?”

“I’m no liar, Mademoiselle.  Besides, I guess it’s no crime to see a boy I’ve known all his life, and his mother and me like sisters.”

“You are a fool,” said Mademoiselle, and turning clumped back in her bedroom slippers to her room.

Ellen went up to her room.  Heretofore she had given her allegiance to Mademoiselle and Mrs. Cardew, and in a more remote fashion, to Howard.  But Ellen, crying angry tears in her small white bed that night, sensed a new division in the family, with Mademoiselle and Anthony and Howard and Grace on one side, and Lily standing alone, fighting valiantly for the right to live her own life, to receive her own friends, and the friends of her friends, even though one of these latter might be a servant in her own house.

Yet Ellen, with the true snobbishness of the servants’ hall, disapproved of Lily’s course while she admired it.

“But they’re all against her,” Ellen reflected.  “The poor thing!  And just because of Willy Cameron.  Well, I’ll stand by her, if they throw me out for it.”

In her romantic head there formed strange, delightful visions.  Lily eloping with Willy Cameron, assisted by herself.  Lily in the little Cameron house, astounding the neighborhood with her clothes and her charm, and being sponsored by Ellen.  The excitement of the village, and the visits to Ellen to learn what to wear for a first call, and were cards necessary?

Into Ellen’s not very hard-working but monotonous life had comes its first dream of romance.

CHAPTER XIII

For three weeks Lily did not see Louis Akers, nor did she go back to the house on Cardew Way.  She hated doing clandestine or forbidden things, and she was, too, determined to add nothing to the tenseness she began to realize existed at home.  She went through her days, struggling to fit herself again into the old environment, reading to her mother, lending herself with assumed enthusiasm to such small gayeties as Lent permitted, and doing penance in a dozen ways for that stolen afternoon with Louis Akers.

She had been forbidden to see him again.  It had come about by Grace’s confession to Howard as to Lily’s visit to the Doyles.  He had not objected to that.

“Unless Doyle talks his rubbish to her,” he said.  “She said something the other night that didn’t sound like her.  Was any one else there?”

“An attorney named Akers,” she said.

And at that Howard had scowled.

“She’d better keep away altogether,” he observed, curtly.  “She oughtn’t to meet men like that.”

“Shall I tell her?”

“I’ll tell her,” he said.  And tell her he did, not too tactfully, and man-like shielding her by not telling her his reasons.