“Don’t I look superb?” said Maggie.  She shut the wardrobe-door and surveyed herself in its long glass.  Brown was Maggie Oliphant’s color.  It harmonized with the soft tints of her delicately rounded face, with the rich color in her hair, with the light in her eyes.  It added to all these charms, softening them, giving to them a more perfect luster.

“Oh, Maggie!” said Nancy, clasping her hands, “you ought always to be dressed as you are now.”

Maggie dropped her arms suddenly to her sides.  The jacket, a little too large for her, slid off her shoulders and lay in a heap on the floor.

“What?” she said suddenly.  “Am I never to show my true and real self?  Am I always to be disguised in sham beauty and sham goodness?  Oh, Nancy, Nancy! if there is a creature I hate—­ I hate—­ her name is Maggie Oliphant!”

Nancy picked up the sealskin jacket and put it back into the wardrobe.

“I am sorry you went to the auction, Maggie,” she repeated, “and I’m sorry still to find you bought poor Polly Singleton’s sealskin.  Well, it’s done now, and we have to consider how to get you out of this scrape.

There’s no time for you to indulge in that morbid talk of yours to-day, Maggie, darling.  Let us consider what’s best to be done.”

“Nothing,” retorted Maggie.  “I shall simply go to Miss Heath and Miss Eccleston and tell them the truth.  There’s nothing else to be done.  No hope whatever of getting out of the affair.  I went to Polly Singleton’s auction because Rosalind Merton raised the demon in me.  I tried to become the possessor of the sealskin jacket because her heart was set on it.  I won an eighty-guinea jacket for ten guineas.  You see how ignoble my motives were, also how unworthy the results.  I did worse even than that—­ for I will out with the truth to you, Nancy—­ I revenged myself still further upon that spiteful little gnat, Rosalind, and raised the price of her coveted coral to such an extent that I know by her face she is pounds in debt for it.  Now, my dear, what have you to say to me?  Nothing good, I know that.  Let me read Aristotle for the next hour just to calm my mind.”

Maggie turned away, seated herself by her writing bureau and tried to lose both the past and the present in her beloved Greek.

“She will do it, too,” whispered Nancy as she left the room.  “No one ever was made quite like Maggie.  She can feel tortures and yet the next moment she can be in ecstasy.  She is so tantalizing that at times you are almost brought to believe her own stories about herself.  You are almost sure that she has got the black self as well as the white self.  But through it all, yes, through it all, you love her.  Dear Maggie!  Whatever happens, I must always—­ always love her.”

Nancy was walking slowly down the corridor when a room-door was gently opened and the sweet, childish, innocent face of Rosalind peeped out.

“Nancy, is that you?  Do, for Heaven’s sake, come in and speak to me for a moment.”