“Mr. Stirling,” said Miss De Voe, in a doubtful, “won’t-you-please” voice, such as few men had ever heard from her, “I want you to let me send you home?  It will only take a moment to have the carriage here.”

“I wouldn’t take a horse out in such weather,” said Peter, in a very settling kind of voice.

“He’s obstinate,” thought Miss De Voe.  “And he makes his obstinacy so dreadfully—­dreadfully pronounced!” Aloud she said:  “You will come again?”

“If you will let me.”

“Do.  I am very much alone too, as perhaps you know?” Miss De Voe did not choose to say that her rooms could be filled nightly and that everywhere she was welcome.

“No.  I really know nothing about you, except what you have told me, and what I have seen.”

Miss De Voe laughed merrily at Peter’s frankness.  “I feel as if I knew all about you,” she said.

“But you have asked questions,” replied Peter.

Miss De Voe caught her breath again.  Try as she would, she could not get accustomed to Peter.  All her social experience failed to bridge the chasm opened by his speech.  “What did he mean by that plain statement, spoken in such a matter-of-fact voice?” she asked herself.  Of course the pause could not continue indefinitely, and she finally said:  “I have lived alone ever since my father’s death.  I have relatives, but prefer to stay here.  I am so much more independent.  I suppose I shall have to move some day.  This part of the city is beginning to change so.”  Miss De Voe was merely talking against time, and was not sorry when Peter shook hands, and left her alone.

“He’s very different from most men,” she said to the blazing logs.  “He is so uncomplimentary and outspoken!  How can he succeed in politics?  Still, after the conventional society man he is—­he is—­very refreshing.  I think I must help him a little socially.”

CHAPTER XXVII.

A DINNER.

The last remark made by Miss De Voe to her fire resulted, after a few days, in Peter’s receiving a formal dinner invitation, which he accepted with a promptness not to be surpassed by the best-bred diner-out.  He regretted now his vamping of the old suit.  Peter understood that he was in for quite another affair than the Avery, the Gallagher, or even the Purple dinner.  He did not worry, however, and if in the dressing-room he looked furtively at the coats of the other men, he entirely forgot the subject the moment he started downstairs, and thought no further of it till he came to take off the suit in his own room.

When Peter entered the drawing-room, he found it well filled with young people, and for a moment a little of the bewildered feeling of four years before came over him.  But he found himself chatting with Miss De Voe, and the feeling left him as quickly as it had come.  In a moment he was introduced to a “Miss Lenox,” who began talking in an easy way which gave Peter just as much or as little to say as he chose.  Peter wondered if many girls were as easy to talk to as—­as—­Miss Lenox.