“Which she has done.  For I saw her in the street, yesterday, with a beautiful new lawn, and her little Julia was with her, wearing one precisely like it.”

“How any woman can do so is more than I can understand.”

“So it is, Mrs. Raynor.  Just to think of dressing your child up in a frock as good as stolen!  Isn’t it dreadful?”

“It is, indeed!”

“Mrs. Comegys is not an honest woman.  That is clear.  I am told that this is not the first trick of the kind of which she has been guilty.  They say that she has a natural propensity to take things that are not her own.”

“I can hardly believe that.”

“Nor can I. But it’s no harder to believe this than to believe that she would cheat Perkins out of fifteen of twenty yards of lawn.  It’s a pity; for Mrs. Comegys, in every thing else, is certainly a very nice woman.  In fact, I don’t know any one I visit with so much pleasure.”

Thus the circle of detraction widened, until there was scarcely a friend or acquaintance of Mrs. Comegys, near or remote, who had not heard of her having cheated a dry goods dealer out of several yards of lawn.  Three, it had first been alleged; but the most common version of the story made it fifteen or twenty.  Meantime, Mrs. Comegys remained in entire ignorance of what was alleged against her, although she noticed in two or three of her acquaintances, a trifling coldness that struck her as rather singular.

One day her husband, seeing that she looked quite sober, said—­

“You seem quite dull to-day, dear.  Don’t you feel well?”

“Yes, I feel as well as usual, in body.”

“But not in mind?”

“I do not feel quite comfortable in mind, certainly, though I don’t know that I have any serious cause of uneasiness.”

“Though a slight cause exists.  May I ask what it is?”

“It is nothing more nor less than that I was coolly cut by an old friend to-day, whom I met in a store on Chesnut street.  And as she is a woman that I highly esteem, both for the excellence of her character, and the agreeable qualities, as a friend, that she possesses.  I cannot but feel a little bad about it.  If she were one of that capricious class who get offended with you, once a month, for no just cause whatever, I should not care a fig.  But Mrs. Markle is a woman of character, good sense and good feeling, whose friendship I have always prized.”

“Was it Mrs. Markle?” said the husband, with some surprise.

“Yes.”

“What can possibly be the cause?”

“I cannot tell.”

“Have you thought over every thing?”

“Yes, I have turned and turned the matter in my mind, but can imagine no reason why she, of all others, could treat me coolly.”

“Have you never spoken of her in a way to have your words misinterpreted by some evil-minded person—­Mrs. Grimes, for instance—­whose memory, or moral sense, one or the other, is very dull?”