Aunt Isabelle pulled her down beside her.  “Rebellious Mary,” she said, “who is going to tame you?”

They laughed a little, clinging to each other, and than Mary said, “You must go to bed, Aunt Isabelle.  I’m keeping you up shamefully.”

They kissed again and separated, and Mary made ready for bed.  She took off her cap, and all her lovely hair fell about her.  That was another of her contrary ways.  She and Constance had been taught to braid it neatly, but from little girlhood Mary had protested, and on going to bed with two prim pigtails had been known to wake up in the middle of the night and take them down, only to be discovered in the morning with all her fair curls in a tangle.  Scolding had not availed.  Once, as dire punishment, the curls had been cut off.  But Mary had rejoiced.  “It makes me look like a boy,” she had told her mother, calmly, “and I like it.”

Another of her little girl fancies had been to say her prayers aloud.  She said them that way to-night, kneeling by her bed with her fair head on her folded hands.

Then she turned out the light, and drew her curtains back.  As she looked out at the driving rain, the flare of the street lamp showed a motionless figure on the terrace.  For a moment she peered, palpitating, then flew into Aunt Isabelle’s room.

“There’s some one in the garden.”

“Perhaps it’s Barry.”

“Didn’t he come with you?”

“No.  He went on with Leila and the General.”

“But it is two o’clock, Aunt Isabelle.”

“I didn’t know; I thought perhaps he had come.”

Going back into her room, Mary threw on her blue dressing-gown and slippers and opened her door.  The light was still burning in the hall.  Barry always turned it out when he came.  She stood undecided, then started down the back stairs, but halted as the door opened and a dark figure appeared.

“Barry——­”

Roger Poole looked up at her.  “It isn’t your brother,” he said.  “I—­I must beg your pardon for disturbing you.  I could not sleep, and I went out——­” He stopped and stammered.  Poised there above him with all the wonder of her unbound hair about her, she was like some celestial vision.

She smiled at him.  “It doesn’t matter,” she said; “please don’t apologize.  It was foolish of me to be—­frightened.  But I had forgotten that there was any one else in the house.”

She was unconscious of the effect of her words.  But his soul shrank within him.  To her he was the lodger who paid the rent.  To him she was, well, just now she was, to him, the Blessed Damosel!

Faintly in the distance they heard the closing of a door.  “It’s Barry,” Mary said, and suddenly a wave of self-consciousness swept over her.  What would Barry think to find her at this hour talking to Roger Poole?  And what would he think of Roger Poole, who walked in the garden on a rainy night?