“If you must stay,” she rejoined, “can’t you get a room in some other part of the house?”

But one last mistake in dealing with her, in her present nervous condition, was left to make—­and the innocent Arnold made it.  “In some other part of the house?” he repeated, jestingly.  “The landlady would be scandalized.  Mr. Bishopriggs would never allow it!”

She rose, and stamped her foot impatiently on the floor.  “Don’t joke!” she exclaimed.  “This is no laughing matter.”  She paced the room excitedly.  “I don’t like it!  I don’t like it!”

Arnold looked after her, with a stare of boyish wonder.

“What puts you out so?” he asked.  “Is it the storm?”

She threw herself on the sofa again.  “Yes,” she said, shortly.  “It’s the storm.”

Arnold’s inexhaustible good-nature was at once roused to activity again.

“Shall we have the candles,” he suggested, “and shut the weather out?” She turned irritably on the sofa, without replying.  “I’ll promise to go away the first thing in the morning!” he went on.  “Do try and take it easy—­and don’t be angry with me.  Come! come! you wouldn’t turn a dog out, Miss Silvester, on such a night as this!”

He was irresistible.  The most sensitive woman breathing could not have accused him of failing toward her in any single essential of consideration and respect.  He wanted tact, poor fellow—­but who could expect him to have learned that always superficial (and sometimes dangerous) accomplishment, in the life he had led at sea?  At the sight of his honest, pleading face, Anne recovered possession of her gentler and sweeter self.  She made her excuses for her irritability with a grace that enchanted him.  “We’ll have a pleasant evening of it yet!” cried Arnold, in his hearty way—­and rang the bell.

The bell was hung outside the door of that Patmos in the wilderness—­otherwise known as the head-waiter’s pantry.  Mr. Bishopriggs (employing his brief leisure in the seclusion of his own apartment) had just mixed a glass of the hot and comforting liquor called “toddy” in the language of North Britain, and was just lifting it to his lips, when the summons from Arnold invited him to leave his grog.

“Haud yer screechin’ tongue!” cried Mr. Bishopriggs, addressing the bell through the door.  “Ye’re waur than a woman when ye aince begin!”

The bell—­like the woman—­went on again.  Mr. Bishopriggs, equally pertinacious, went on with his toddy.

“Ay! ay! ye may e’en ring yer heart out—­but ye won’t part a Scotchman from his glass.  It’s maybe the end of their dinner they’ll be wantin’.  Sir Paitrick cam’ in at the fair beginning of it, and spoilt the collops, like the dour deevil he is!” The bell rang for the third time.  “Ay! ay! ring awa’!  I doot yon young gentleman’s little better than a belly-god—­there’s a scandalous haste to comfort the carnal part o’ him in a’ this ringin’!  He knows naething o’ wine,” added Mr. Bishopriggs, on whose mind Arnold’s discovery of the watered sherry still dwelt unpleasantly.