“Oh,” panted Mrs. Lee, “anything except being caught up-stairs in their bedrooms!  They might think—­anything.”

“Hurry!” hissed Mrs. Van Dorn.  They could hear the footsteps very distinctly, and the cigar-smoke made them want to cough.  Holding their silk skirts like twisted ropes around them so they should not rustle, still clinging closely one to the other, the two women began slowly moving, inch by inch, through the upper hall, towards the back stairs.  These they descended in safety, and emerged on the lower hall.

They were looking for a rear door, with the view of a stealthy egress and a skirting of the bushes on the lawn unobserved until they should gain the shelter of the carriage, when there was a movement at their backs, and a voice observed, “Good-afternoon, ladies,” and they turned, and there was Captain Arthur Carroll.  He was a man possibly well over forty, possibly older than that, but his face was as smooth as a boy’s, and he was a man of great stature, with nevertheless a boyish cant to his shoulders.  Captain Arthur Carroll was a very handsome man, with a viking sort of beauty.  He was faultlessly dressed in one of the lightest of spring suits and a fancy waistcoat, and he held quite gracefully the knot of violets which had fallen from Mrs. Van Dorn’s bonnet.

The two stood before him, gasping, coloring, trembling.  For both of them it was horrible.  All their lives they had been women who had held up their heads high in point of respectability and more.  None was above them in Banbridge, no shame of wrong-doing or folly had ever been known by either of them, and now both their finely bonneted heads were in the dust.  They stood before this handsome, courteously smiling gentleman and were conscious of a very nakedness of spirit.  Their lust of curiosity was laid bare, they were caught in the act.  Mrs. Van Dorn opened her mouth, she tried to speak, but she only made a strange, croaking sound.  Her face was now flaming.  But Mrs. Lee was pale, and she stood rather unsteadily.

Arthur Carroll at first looked merely bewildered.  “Aren’t the ladies at home?” said he.  “Have you seen the ladies?” He glanced at Mrs. Van Dorn’s deflowered bonnet, and extended the bunch of violets.  “Yours, I think,” he said.  Mrs. Van Dorn took them with an idiotic expression, and he asked again if they had seen the ladies.

The spectacle of two elderly, well-dressed females of Banbridge quaking before him in this wise, and of their sudden appearance in his house, was a mystery too great to be grasped at once even by a clever man, and he was certainly a clever man.  So he stared for a second, while the two remained standing before him, holding their card-cases in their shaking, white-gloved fingers, and Mrs. Van Dorn with the violets; then suddenly an expression of the most delighted comprehension and amusement overspread his face.

“Oh,” he said, politely, with a great flourish, as it were of deference, “the ladies are not in.  They will be exceedingly sorry to have missed your call.  But will you not come in and sit down?”