With the impulsiveness of youth, a wonderful friendship sprang up between the two; they rode, walked and shopped together; in short, became inseparable companions. The stranger received every attention in the family that could be given an honored guest. Livingston and Briggs watched her with some anxiety; would she be able to sustain the position of intimate friendship to which Molly had elected her? But both breathed more freely when they noted her perfect manners, the ease and good-breeding displayed in all her intercourse with those socially above the level to which they knew this girl was born. She acceded the luxury of her new surroundings as one to the manner born.

“We need not have feared for her; by Jove, she’s a thorough-bred!” exclaimed Aubrey one day to Reuel. The latter nodded as he looked up from his hook.

“And why not? Probably the best blood of the country flows in the poor girl’s veins. Who can tell? Why should she not be a thorough-bred?”

“True,” replied Aubrey, as a slight frown passed over his face.

“I am haunted by a possibility, Aubrey,” continued Reuel. “What if memory suddenly returns? Is it safe to risk the unpleasantness of a public reawakening of her sleeping faculties? I have read of such things.”

Aubrey shrugged his handsome shoulders. “We must risk something for the sake of science; where no one is injured by deception there is no harm done.”

“Now that question has presented itself to me repeatedly lately: Is deception justifiable for any reason? Somehow it haunts me that trouble may come from this. I wish we had told the exact truth about her identity.”

“‘If ’twere done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly,’”11 murmured Aubrey with a sarcastic smile on his face. “How you balk at nothing, Reuel,” he drawled mockingly.

“Oh, call me a fool and done with it, Aubrey: I suppose I am; but one didn’t make one’s self.”

Drives about the snow-clad suburbs of Cambridge with Briggs and Molly, at first helped to brighten the invalid; then came quiet social diversions at which Dianthe was the great attraction.

It was at an afternoon function that Reuel took courage to speak of his love. A dozen men buzzed about “Miss Adams” in the great bay window where Molly had placed Dianthe, her superb beauty set off by a simple toilet. People came and went constantly. Musical girls, generally with gold eyeglasses on aesthetic noses, played grim classical preparations, which have as cheerful an effect on a gay crowd as the perfect, irreproachable skeleton of a bygone beauty might have; or articulate, with cultivation and no voices to speak of, arias which would sap the life of a true child of song to render as the maestro intended.