Just then the door shut softly; and Gavinia ran to see who had been listening, with the result that she hid herself in the coal-cellar.

While she was there, Miss Ailie and Mr. McLean were sitting in the blue-and-white room very self-conscious, and Miss Ailie was speaking confusedly of anything and everything, saying more in five minutes than had served for the previous hour, and always as she slackened she read an intention in his face that started her tongue upon another journey.  But, “Timid Ailie,” he said at last, “do you think you can talk me down?” and then she gave him a look of reproach that turned treacherously into one of appeal, but he had the hardihood to continue; “Ailie, do you need to be told what I want to say?”

Miss Ailie stood quite still now, a stiff, thick figure, with a soft, plain face and nervous hands.  “Before you speak,” she said, nervously, “I have something to tell you that—­perhaps then you will not say it.

“I have always led you to believe,” she began, trembling, “that I am forty-nine.  I am fifty-one.”

He would have spoken, but the look of appeal came back to her face, asking him to make it easier for her by saying nothing.  She took a pair of spectacles from her pocket, and he divined what this meant before she spoke.  “I have avoided letting you see that I need them,” she said.  “You—­men don’t like—­” She tried to say it all in a rush, but the words would not come.

“I am beginning to be a little deaf,” she went on.  “To deceive you about that, I have sometimes answered you without really knowing what you said.”

“Anything more, Ailie?”

“My accomplishments—­they were never great, but Kitty and I thought my playing of classical pieces—­my fingers are not sufficiently pliable now.  And I—­I forget so many things.”

“But, Ailie—­”

“Please let me tell you.  I was reading a book, a story, last winter, and one of the characters, an old maid, was held up to ridicule in it for many little peculiarities that—­that I recognized as my own.  They had grown upon me without my knowing that they made me ridiculous, and now I—­I have tried, but I cannot alter them.”

“Is that all, Ailie?”

“No.”

The last seemed to be the hardest to say.  Dusk had come on, and they could not see each other well.  She asked him to light the lamp, and his back was toward her while he did it, wondering a little at her request.  When he turned, her hands rose like cowards to hide her head, but she pulled them down.  “Do you not see?” she said.

“I see that you have done something to your hair,” he answered, “I liked it best the other way.”

Most people would have liked it best the other way.  There was still a good deal of it, but the “bun” in which it ended had gone strangely small.  “The rest was false,” said Miss Ailie, with a painful effort; “at least, it is my own, but it came out when—­when Kitty died.”