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Here she broke off for a moment. I did not venture to look at her, but I thought her voice trembled a little when she spoke again. ‘I don’t quite know why I tell you all this. There was a time when I never could bear the end of it myself,’ she said; ‘but I have begun, and I will finish now. Well, Pepper’s mistress went towards him, and called him; but–whether he was still too dizzy to quite understand who she was, or whether his pride came uppermost again, poor dear! I don’t know–but he gave her just one look (she says she will never forget it–never; it went straight to her heart), and then he walked very slowly and deliberately away.

‘She couldn’t bear it; she followed; she felt she simply must make him understand how very, very sorry she was for him; but the moment he heard her he began to run faster and faster, until he was out of reach and out of sight, and she had to come back. I know she was crying bitterly by that time.’

‘And he never came back again?’ I asked, after a silence.

‘Never again!’ she said softly; ‘that was the very last they ever saw or heard of him. And–and I’ve always loved every dog since for Pepper’s sake!’

‘I’m almost glad he did decline to come back,’ I declared; ‘it served his mistress right–she didn’t deserve anything else!’

‘Ah, I didn’t want you to say that!’ she protested; ‘she never meant to be so unkind–it was all for the baby’s sake!’

I was distinctly astonished, for all her sympathy in telling the story had seemed to lie in the other direction.

‘You don’t mean to say,’ I cried involuntarily, ‘that you can find any excuses for her? I did not expect you would take the baby’s part!’

‘But I did,’ she confessed, with lowered eyes–‘I did take the baby’s part–it was all my doing that Pepper was sent away–I have been sorry enough for it since!’

It was her own story she had been telling at second-hand after all–and she was not Miss So-and-so! I had entirely forgotten the existence of any other members of the party but our two selves, but at the moment of this discovery–which was doubly painful–I was recalled by a general rustle to the fact that we were at a dinner-party, and that our hostess had just given the signal.

As I rose and drew back my chair to allow my neighbour to pass, she raised her eyes for a moment and said almost meekly:

‘I was the baby, you see!’