Very quietly little Eve Edgarton shut the door again and came back into the middle of her room and stood there hesitatingly for an instant.

Then quite abruptly she crossed to her bureau and pushing aside the old ivory toilet articles, began to jerk her tously hair first one way and then another across her worried forehead.

“But if you knew you were a rose?” she mused perplexedly to herself.  “That is—­if you felt almost sure that you were,” she added with sudden humility.  “That is—­” she corrected herself—­“that is—­if you felt almost sure that you could be a rose—­if anybody wanted you to be one?”

In impulsive experimentation she gave another tweak to her hair, and pinched a poor bruised-looking little blush into the hollow of one thin little cheek.  “But suppose it was the—­the people—­going by,” she faltered, “who never even dreamed that you were a rose?  Suppose it was the—­Suppose it was—­Suppose—­”

Dejection unspeakable settled suddenly upon her—­an agonizing sense of youth’s futility.  Rackingly above the crash and lilt of music, the quick, wild thud of dancing feet, the sharp, staccato notes of laughter—­she heard the dull, heavy, unrhythmical tread of the oncoming years—­gray years, limping eternally from to-morrow on, through unloved lands, on unloved errands.

“This is the end of youth.  It is—­it is—­it is,” whimpered her heart.

“It isn’t!” something suddenly poignant and determinate shrilled startlingly in her brain.  “I’ll have one more peep at youth, anyway!” threatened the brain.

“If we only could!” yearned the discouraged heart.

Speculatively for one brief instant the girl stood cocking her head toward the door of her father’s room.  Then, expeditiously, if not fashionably, she began at once to rearrange her tousled hair, and after one single pat to her gown—­surely the quickest toilet-making of that festive evening—­snatched up a slipper in each hand, crept safely past her father’s door, crept safely out at last through her own door into the hall, and still carrying a slipper in each hand, had reached the head of the stairs before a new complexity assailed her.

“Why—­why, I’ve never yet—­been anywhere—­alone—­without my mother’s memory!” she faltered, aghast.

Then impetuously, with a little frown of material inconvenience, but no flicker whatsoever in the fixed spiritual habit of her life, she dropped her slippers on the floor, sped back to her room, hesitated on the threshold a moment with real perplexity, darted softly to her trunk, rummaged as noiselessly through it as a kitten’s paws, discovered at last the special object of her quest—­a filmy square of old linen and lace—­thrust it into her belt with her own handkerchief, and went creeping back again to her slippers at the head of the stairs.

As if to add fresh nervousness to the situation, one of the slippers lay pointing quite boldly down-stairs.  But the other slipper—­true as a compass to the north—­toed with unmistakable severity toward the bedroom.