And then Mats, quite mollified, was speaking in her artless way of Hugo Canning, who had so obviously been on her mind all along.

“People keep asking me,” she said, still just a little plaintive, “and I have to say I don’t know one thing.  It makes me so ashamed.  They think I’m not your best friend any more.”

Cally observed that all that was too absurd.  For the rest, she seemed somewhat evasive.

“I feel, dearie,” said Mats, “that I ought to know what concerns your life’s happiness.  You don’t know how anxious I’ve been about you while you were sick....”  If there seemed a tiny scratch in that, the next remark was more like a purr:  “People say that he did something perfectly terrible, and you threw him over.”

“Well, Mats, you know people always get things exactly wrong.”

“Then you didn’t?” demanded her best friend, with a purely feminine gleam.

And Cally, ardently wishing to be free of this subject, said gaily that Mr. Canning had thrown her over—­the second time, too!  So she had told him that she had some spirit, that some day he would do that once too often....

“Oh, you’re joking,” said Mats, quite pettishly.  “Dear, I don’t care for jokes.”

And then, as she gazed, not without envy, at her friend’s profile, so strangely sweet and gay, she exclaimed suddenly in a shocked tone:  “I believe you really did do it!”

“Whisper it not in Gath,” said Cally, with shining calm....

It was a belief, so mamma had cried in the midnight, which nobody outside of institutions for the feeble-minded would ever hold.  But Cally was struck only with Mattie’s enormous seriousness.  Self-reproach filled her for the interval that seemed to lie between them....

“Mats, you know I’ve never kept secrets from you.  I’ll tell you everything you want to hear about it, from beginning to end.  Only—­not to-day.”

The kaleidoscope shifted:  Mattie faded out of the purview, and in her stead sat the Misses Winton, who had helped to pass the time in Europe last year, but whose presence had a contrary effect to-day.  And she wondered how they could not see for themselves what a shell of a hostess they were talking at.  All her being was so far away from company:  one half of her continually flowing back over the months; the rest always going forward to the afternoon, and beyond; nothing at all left here....

Certainly she would tease him a little about the neat way he and papa had dropped her out of the Works. “And I thought I was the one who was doing it, too!...”

Callers gone; and then mamma, in the vein of dignity, was inviting her opinion about the color scheme of her luncheon-table.  And with what an uprush of affection she responded, what eagerness to help, to be friends again!...  And then it was time for her to make ready for luncheon herself.  One-thirty o’clock; a long day....