“Don’t you worry about me; I’m all right.  What I want to say is, lend me your keys; I can’t go home this way—­lend me your keys and I’ll go to your rooms and sleep it off.”

“All right, Marsh; think you can get there?”

“Of course; I’m all right.”

“And you’ll go there if I give you my keys—­you’ll go nowhere else?”

“Of course I won’t, Andy!”

“You won’t stop to talk with any one?”

“Who’ll I find to talk with at this time of the night?” laughed the drunken man derisively.  “It’s three o’clock!  Say, Andy, who’ll I find to talk to?”

“By God, I hope no one, you fool!” muttered Gilmore.

“Well, give me the keys, Andy.  I’ll go along and get to bed, and I want you to forget this conversation—­”

“Oh, I’ll forget it all right, Marsh—­but you won’t after you come to your senses!” he added under his breath.

“Give me the keys—­thanks.  Good night, Andy!  I’ll see you in the morning.”

He reeled uncertainly down the path, cursing his treacherous footing as he went.  At the gate he paused and waved an unsteady farewell to the gambler, who stood on the porch staring after him.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE BEAUTY OF ELIZABETH

His interview with Evelyn Langham left North with a sense of moral nausea, yet he felt he had somehow failed in his comprehension of her, that she had not meant him to understand her as he had; that, after all, perhaps the significance he had given to her words was of his own imagining.

He waited in his room until she should have time to be well on her way home, then hurried down-stairs.  He was to dine at the Herberts’ at seven o’clock, and as their place was but scant two miles from town, he determined to walk.  He crossed the Square, only stopping to speak with the little lamplighter, and twenty minutes later Mount Hope, in the cold breath of the storm, had dwindled to a huddle of faint ghostly lights on the hillside and in the valley.

The Herbert home, a showy country-place in a region of farms, merited a name; but no one except Mrs. Herbert, who in the first flush of possession determined so to dignify it, had ever made use of the name she had chosen after much deliberation.  General Herbert himself called it simply the farm, while to the neighbors and the dwellers in Mount Hope it was known as the general’s place, which perhaps sufficiently distinguished it; for its owner was still always spoken of as the general, though since the war he had been governor of his state.