Just here came up Dakie Thayne.  The actors, in costume, were gradually mingling among the audience, and Barbara Frietchie, in white hair, from which there was not time to remove the powder, plain cap and kerchief, and brown woolen gown, with her silken flag yet in her hand, came with him.  This boy, who “was always everywhere,” made no hesitation, but walked straight up to the central group, taking Leslie by the hand.  Close to the General, he waited courteously for a long sentence of Mrs. Thoresby’s to be ended, and then said, simply, “Uncle James, this is my friend Miss Leslie Goldthwaite.  My brother, Dr. Ingleside—­why, where is Noll?”

Dr. Oliver Ingleside had stepped out of the circle in the last half of the long sentence.  The Sister of Mercy—­no longer in costume, however—­had come down the little flight of steps that led from the stage to the floor.  At their foot the young army surgeon was shaking hands with Susan Josselyn.  These two had had the chess-practice together—­and other practice—­down there among the Southern hospitals.

Mrs. Thoresby’s face was very like some fabric subjected to chemical experiment, from which one color and aspect has been suddenly and utterly discharged to make room for something different and new.  Between the first and last there waits a blank.  With this blank full upon her, she stood there for one brief, unprecedented instant in her life, a figure without presence or effect.  I have seen a daguerreotype in which were cap, hair, and collar, quite correct,—­what should have been a face rubbed out.  Mrs. Thoresby rubbed herself out, and so performed her involuntary tableau.

“Of course I might have guessed.  I wonder it never occurred to me,” Mrs. Linceford was replying presently, to her vacuous inquiry.  “The name seemed familiar, too; only he called himself ‘Dakie.’  I remember perfectly now.  Old Jacob Thayne, the Chicago millionaire.  He married pretty little Mrs. Ingleside, the Illinois Representative’s widow, that first winter I was in Washington.  Why, Dakie must be a dollar prince!”

He was just Dakie Thayne, though, for all that.  He and Leslie and Cousin Delight, the Josselyns and the Inglesides, dear Miss Craydocke hurrying up to congratulate, Marmaduke Wharne looking on without a shade of cynicism in the gladness of his face, and Sin Saxon and Frank Scherman flitting up in the pauses of dance and promenade,—­well, after all, these were the central group that night.  The pivot of the little solar system was changed; but the chief planets made but slight account of that; they just felt that it had grown very warm and bright.

“Oh, Chicken Little!” Mrs. Linceford cried to Leslie Goldthwaite, giving her a small shake with her good-night kiss at her door.  “How did you know the sky was going to fall?  And how have you led us all this chase to cheat Fox Lox at last?”