There could be no doubt of this.  When all was done, even before the lanterns and the fires were lighted, the drawing-room, the hall, and the dining-room all had taken on such a festal air that it could occur to nobody to miss the furniture which ordinarily occupies houses of this character.  Across the hall two rooms had been arranged for dressing-rooms, and even these were highly attractive.

After the lanterns were lighted, outside was fairyland!  Inside, with the fireplaces burning huge logs and flashing intermittently over the scene, the jack-o’-lanterns grinning cheerfully from every corner, the flags and bunting contributing colour, and the masses of evergreen and clumps of corn-shocks adding nooks and corners for shadows to dance in, there certainly could have been no quainter or prettier background for a party.

“What I want to know is, whether the lady of the manor feels her part.  She certainly looks it!”

It was Jarvis’s greeting as he came up the steps into the big porch, after a hasty trip home to dress.  Just as he approached the house a figure in white had come out of the doorway, and he congratulated himself on having caught Sally alone for the first time in several days.

Sally met him with an eager welcome:  “Oh, I’m so glad you got back before the rest came!  I wanted you here to help make things go from the beginning.  Max is having fits with his tie, and Alec is in distress because his pumps don’t look as smart as he thinks they ought.  Even Bob is more than usually fussy about the parting of his hair!”

“Too bad, but such small anxieties always go along with dress occasions.  You don’t answer my question.  Do you feel like the mistress of an ancestral home?”

“Do I?  I should say I didn’t.  I feel like a small girl giving her first party.  I hadn’t a thing to wear but this old white frock—­it’s lucky for me our lights are the sort they are.  Electrics would show me up for what I am.”

“Do you know what you are?”

“Hardly—­to-night.  What am I, do you think?”

“A healthy, happy, sensible girl, who doesn’t care if she isn’t wearing a fussy frock from the most expensive place in town.  And if you were, you couldn’t look nicer.”

“Thank you.  That’s a straight masculine compliment, and I appreciate it.  How good it seems to see you without those blue glasses!  Are you going to leave them off to-night?”

“I certainly am.  I don’t care to contribute to the weird effects among the jack-o’-lanterns.  I want to see everything as it is to-night—­including Sally Lane.”

She looked straight into his eyes, with the frank friendliness which never dreamed of turning these pleasant speeches into meaning ones.  She was heartily pleased to see him without the disfiguring glasses, for the brown eyes were fine ones, and the face was full of character as well as comeliness.

“No girl ever had such good friends as Sally Lunn,” she said.  “Do you think I don’t know that no decorations of your house in town ever called for so much bunting and crash and so many flags and lanterns as we have here to-night?  The others haven’t thought of it, but I’ve done a bit of estimating, if you please.”