They sat down in the dining room, Julia Blake-
lock watching them under her eyelids from her seat
across the table, waiting for the proper time for
her attack. The second course was almost over
before she launched it.
"Oh, Mrs. Fairborn," she said in that sweet,
high, dangerous voice that women use in verbal
warfare.
The Cockatoo looked up. She would, natural-
ly. The other woman almost never spoke to her.
"I almost forgot," the Blakelock girl was going
on, with her sharp eyes looking across above her
smile. "I had a friend from your state I was
writing to about you the other day "

"Yes, ma'am," said the Fairborn woman, wait-
ing in anxious silence. I could see the girl, that
White Shoulders, stop eating and stiffen in her
chair.
"And she told me," went on Julia Blakelock, as
sweetly as she could in that thin voice of hers,
"to ask you if you ever knew a Pitman family in
your county — Dell County, isn't it?"

I saw the girl's hand go out, fumbling for her
water glass, and the frozen smile freeze harder
than ever on the face of the Cockatoo — as full of



78 WHITE SHOULDERS

mirth as the smile of a mummy.
"Oh, yes," she said after a second. "There was
a family of that name there. But I didn't know
them — not well."

"Wasn't there something," asked Julia Blake-
lock, "about a trial? I didn't quite understand
it."

The Cockatoo, her eyes set on her face, her
mouth in a crescent-shape grimace, jumped out
her answer at once — almost before the words had
left her mouth. She had courage anyhow.
"There was something — something," she said.
