"Yes. She told me that she was present when the lawn came home, and saw Mrs. Comegys measure it, and heard her say that she meant to keep it."
"Which she has done. For I saw her in the street, yesterday, with a beautiful new lawn, and her little Julia was with her, wearing one precisely like it."
"How any woman can do so is more than I can understand."
"So it is, Mrs. Raynor. Just to think of dressing your child up in a frock as good as stolen! Isn't it dreadful?"
"It is, indeed!"
"Mrs. Comegys is not an honest woman. That is clear. I am told that this is not the first trick of the kind of which she has been guilty. They say that she has a natural propensity to take things that are not her own."
"I can hardly believe that."
"Nor can I. But it's no harder to believe this than to believe that she would cheat Perkins out of fifteen of twenty yards of lawn. It's a pity; for Mrs. Comegys, in every thing else, is certainly a very nice woman. In fact, I don't know any one I visit with so much pleasure."
Thus the circle of detraction widened, until there was scarcely a friend or acquaintance of Mrs. Comegys, near or remote, who had not heard of her having cheated a dry goods dealer out of several yards of lawn. Three, it had first been alleged; but the most common version of the story made it fifteen or twenty. Meantime, Mrs. Comegys remained in entire ignorance of what was alleged against her, although she noticed in two or three of her acquaintances, a trifling coldness that struck her as rather singular.
One day her husband, seeing that she looked quite sober, said—