And so, for the time, Sin Saxon disappeared.

The next afternoon, Jimmy Wigley brought a big basket of raspberries to the little piazza door.  A pitcher of cream vanished from the tea-table just before the gong was struck.  Nobody supposed the cat had got it.  The people of the house understood pretty well what was going on, and who was at the bottom of it all; but Madam Routh’s party was large, and the life of the place; they would wink hard and long before complaining at anything that might be done in the west wing.

Sin Saxon opened her door upon Miss Craydocke when she was dressed for the German, and about to go downstairs.  “I’ll trust you,” she said, “about the rocking-chair.  You’ll want it, perhaps, till bedtime, and then you’ll just put it in here.  I shouldn’t like to disturb you by coming for it late.  And please step in a minute now, won’t you?”

She took her through the boudoir.  There lay the “spread” upon a long table, contrived by the contribution of one ordinary little one from each sleeping-chamber, and covered by a pair of clean sheets, which swept the floor along the sides.  About it were ranged chairs.  Two pyramids of candles, built up ingeniously by the grouping of bedroom tins upon hidden supports, vine-sprays and mosses serving gracefully for concealment and decoration, stood, one on each side, half way between the ends and centre.  Cake-plates were garnished with wreathed oak-leaves, and in the midst a great white Indian basket held the red, piled-up berries, fresh and fragrant.

“That’s the little bit of righteousness to save the city.  That’s paid for,” said Sin Saxon.  “Jimmy Wigley’s gone home with more scrip than he ever got at once before; and if your chicken-heartedness hadn’t taken the wrong direction, Miss Craydocke, I should be perfectly at ease in my mind.”

“It’s very pretty,” said Miss Craydocke; “but do you think Madam Routh would quite approve?  And why couldn’t you have had it openly in the dining-room?  And what do you call it a ‘howl’ for?” Miss Craydocke’s questions came softly and hesitatingly, as her doubts came.  The little festival was charming—­but for the way and place.

“Oh, Miss Craydocke!  Well, you’re not wicked, and you can’t be supposed to know; but you must take my word for it, that, if it was tamed down, the game wouldn’t be worth the candle.  And the howl?  You just wait and see!”

The invited guests were told to come to the little piazza door.  The girls asked all their partners in the German, and the matronly ladies were asked, as a good many respectable people are civilly invited where their declining is counted upon.  Leslie Goldthwaite, and the Haddens, and Mrs. Linceford, and the Thoresbys were all asked, and might come if they chose.  Their stay would be another matter.  And so the evening and the German went on.

Till eleven, when they broke up; and the entertainers in a body rushed merrily and noisily along the passages to Number Thirteen, West Wing, rousing from their first naps many quietly disposed, delicate people, who kept early hours, and a few babies whose nurses and mammas would bear them anything but gratefully in mind through the midnight hours to come.