The long, wet, windy day wore on.  Mr. Walraven slept through it comfortably in his study.  Mrs. Walraven had a tête-à-tête luncheon with her cousin, the doctor, and dawdled the slow hours away over her tricot and fashion magazines.

Old Mme. Walraven rarely left her own apartments of late days.  Mother-in-law and daughter-in-law detested each other with an intensity not common even in that relationship.  How she ever killed time was a mystery unknown.  Mollie good-naturedly devoted a couple of her precious daily hours to her.  The house was as still as a tomb.  Downstairs, Messrs. Johnson and Wilson, Mr. Coachman, Mme. Cook and Mlle. Chambermaid may have enjoyed themselves in one another’s society, but above the kitchen cabinet all was forlorn and forsaken.

“Awfully slow, all this!” said Miss Dane to herself, with a fearful yawn.  “I’ll die of stagnation if this sort of thing keeps on.  Mariana, howling in the Moated Grange, must have felt a good deal as I do just at present—­a trifle worse, maybe, for I don’t wish I were dead altogether.  The Tombs is gay and festive compared to Fifth Avenue on a rainy day.  I wish I were back playing Fanchon the Cricket, free and happy once more, wearing spangles as Ophelia of Denmark, and a gilt paper crown as Cleopatra of Egypt, I wasn’t married then; and I didn’t go moping about, like an old hen with the distemper, every time it was wet and nasty.  If it keeps on like this I shall have a pretty time of it getting to Fourteenth Street, at ten o’clock to-night.  And I’ll surely go, if it were to rain cats, dogs, and pitchforks!”

She stood drearily at the drawing-room window, looking forlornly out at the empty street.

The eerie twilight was falling, rain and wind rising and falling with it, the street lamps twinkling ghostily through the murky gloaming, the pavement black and shining.  Belated pedestrians hurried along with bowed heads and uplifted umbrellas, the stages rattled past in a ceaseless stream, full to overflowing.  The rainy night was settling down, the storm increasing as the darkness came on.  Mollie surveyed all this disconsolately enough.

“I don’t mind a ducking,” she murmured, plaintively, “and I never take cold; but I don’t want that man to see me looking like a drowned rat.  Oh, if it should turn out to be Hugh—­dear, dear Hugh!” Her face lighted rapturously at the thought.  “I never knew how much I loved him until I lost him.  If it isn’t Hugh, and Hugh asks me to run away with him to-morrow, I’ll do it—­I declare I will—­and the others may go to grass!”

At that moment, voices sounded on the stairs—­the voices of Mrs. Walraven and her cousin.

The drawing-room door was ajar, Mollie’s little figure hidden in the amber drapery of the window, and she could see them plainly, without herself being seen.

“You won’t fail?” Mrs. Walraven said, impressively.  “I will do my part.  Are you equal to yours?”