“Who’s the funny man with the red face talking to Miss Spragg?”

Ralph bent forward.  “The man next to her?  Never saw him before.  But I think you’re mistaken:  she’s not speaking to him.”

“She was—­Wasn’t she, Harriet?”

Miss Ray pinched her lips together without speaking, and Mrs. Van Degen paused for the fraction of a second.  “Perhaps he’s an Apex friend,” she then suggested.

“Very likely.  Only I think she’d have introduced him if he had been.”

His cousin faintly shrugged.  “Shall you encourage that?”

Peter Van Degen, who had strayed into his wife’s box for a moment, caught the colloquy, and lifted his opera-glass.

“The fellow next to Miss Spragg? (By George, Ralph, she’s ripping to-night!) Wait a minute—­I know his face.  Saw him in old Harmon Driscoll’s office the day of the Eubaw Mine meeting.  This chap’s his secretary, or something.  Driscoll called him in to give some facts to the directors, and he seemed a mighty wide-awake customer.”

Clare Van Degen turned gaily to her cousin.  “If he has anything to do with the Driscolls you’d better cultivate him!  That’s the kind of acquaintance the Dagonets have always needed.  I married to set them an example!”

Ralph rose with a laugh.  “You’re right.  I’ll hurry back and make his acquaintance.”  He held out his hand to his cousin, avoiding her disappointed eyes.

Undine, on entering her bedroom late that evening, was startled by the presence of a muffled figure which revealed itself, through the dimness, as the ungirded midnight outline of Mrs. Spragg.

“Mother?  What on earth—?” the girl exclaimed, as Mrs. Spragg pressed the electric button and flooded the room with light.  The idea of a mother’s sitting up for her daughter was so foreign to Apex customs that it roused only mistrust and irritation in the object of the demonstration.

Mrs. Spragg came forward deprecatingly to lift the cloak from her daughter’s shoulders.

“I just had to, Undie—­I told father I had to.  I wanted to hear all about it.”

Undine shrugged away from her.  “Mercy!  At this hour?  You’ll be as white as a sheet to-morrow, sitting up all night like this.”

She moved toward the toilet-table, and began to demolish with feverish hands the structure which Mrs. Heeny, a few hours earlier, had so lovingly raised.  But the rose caught in a mesh of hair, and Mrs. Spragg, venturing timidly to release it, had a full view of her daughter’s face in the glass.

“Why, Undie, you’re as white as a sheet now!  You look fairly sick.  What’s the matter, daughter?”

The girl broke away from her.

“Oh, can’t you leave me alone, mother?  There—­do I look white now?” she cried, the blood flaming into her pale cheeks; and as Mrs. Spragg shrank back, she added more mildly, in the tone of a parent rebuking a persistent child:  “It’s enough to make anybody sick to be stared at that way!”