To my dying day I shall believe it.

Don't tell me!" Mary's announcement of the event was couched in sober terms, shorn of such fine flowers of suggestion and comment.

Yet it breathed an unmistakable satisfaction, which, to Damaris' contrition, found instant echo in her own heart.

She ought, she knew, to feel distressed at poor Theresa's vanishing--only she didn't and couldn't.

As an inherent consequence of the afore-chronicled bridge-crossing, Theresa was more than ever out of the picture.