“A pretty large order, Lady Jeannette.  Well, I’ve had my warning.  Good-night.”

“Perhaps it wasn’t so much warning as counsel,” she returned, a little wistfully.  “How poor Esme’s ears must be burning.  There she goes now.  What a picture!  Come early to-morrow.”

Hal’s last impression of the ballroom, as he turned away, was summed up in one glance from Esme Elliot’s lustrous eyes, as they met his across her partner’s shoulder, smiling him a farewell and a remembrance of their friendly pact.

“Honey-Jinny,” said Mrs. Willard’s husband, after the last guest had gone; “I don’t understand about young Surtaine.  Where did he get it?”

“Get what, dear?  One might suppose he was a corrupt politician.”

“One might suppose he might be anything crooked or wrong, knowing his old, black quack of a father.  But he seems to be clean stuff all through.  He looks it.  He acts it.  He carries himself like it.  And he talks it.  I had a little confab with him out in the smoking-room, and I tell you, Jinny-wife, I believe he’s a real youngster.”

“Well, he had a mother, you know.”

“Did he?  What about her?”

“She was an old friend of my mother’s.  Dr. Surtaine eloped with her out of her father’s country place in Midvale.  He was an itinerant peddler of some cure-all then.  She was a gently born and bred girl, but a mere child, unworldly and very romantic, and she was carried away by the man’s personal beauty and magnetism.”

“I can’t imagine it in a girl of any sort of family.”

“Mother has told me that he had a personal force that was almost hypnotic.  There must have been something else to him, too, for they say that Hal’s mother died, as desperately in love as she had been when she ran away with him, and that he was almost crushed by her loss and never wholly got over it.  He transferred his devotion to the child, who was only three years old when the mother died.  When Hal was a mere child my mother saw him once taking in dollars at a country fair booth,—­just think of it, dearest,—­and she said he was the picture of his girl-mother then.  Later, when Professor Certain, as he called himself then, got rich, he gave Hal the best of education.  But he never let him have anything to do with the Ellersleys—­that was Mrs. Surtaine’s name.  All the family are dead now.”

“Well, there must be some good in the old boy,” admitted Willard.  “But I don’t happen to like him.  I do like the boy.  Blood does tell, Jinny.  But if he’s really as much of an Ellersley as he looks, there’s a bitter enlightenment before him when he comes to see Dr. Surtaine as he really is.”

Meantime Hal, home at a reasonable hour, in the interest of his new profession, had taken with him the pleasantest impressions of the Willards’ hospitality.  He slept soundly and awoke in buoyant spirits for the dawning enterprise.  On the breakfast table he found, in front of his plate, a bunchy envelope addressed in a small, strong, unfamiliar hand.  Within was no written word; only a spray of the trailing arbutus, still unwithered of its fairy-pink, still eloquent, in its wayward, woodland fragrance, of her who had worn it the night before.