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If ever there existed a scrupulously honest and loyal woman, Madame Hortense was that one. Yet without any hesitation whatsoever she stepped to the window and resolutely opened the blotting-book. Between the rough leaves there was nothing save a few clear sheets of lavender-gray note-paper bearing the same letters, L. S., in violet and gold, and Madame Hortense let the covers fall together with some abruptness. She glanced into the immaculate depths of a beribboned basket near by, and was on the point of passing on into the adjacent bedroom when the violent stain made by a crimson-morocco volume on the pale loveliness of the room made her stop and take up the eye-offending object. “Scott’s Poems, by Scott. For a good little girl,” was the enlightening device she read on the fly-leaf, writ in an angular and manful, if not masculine, hand, and this was signed, “From Aunt Elizabeth.” Madame Hortense lacked perhaps a keen sense of humor, but yet she laughed, and was about to thrust the double absurdity out of sight when it slipped from her fingers and fell with a crash to the floor, flying open as it fell, and flinging half a dozen sheets of the lavender-gray paper in as many different directions.