“If you will move, my good lady, perhaps I can,” said Doctor Kittredge, in a calm tone of voice.  “He’s not choking, my friends,” the Doctor added immediately, when he got sight of him.

“It ’s apoplexy,—­I told you so,—­don’t you see how red he is in the face?” said old Mrs. Peake, a famous woman for “nussin” sick folks, —­determined to be a little ahead of the Doctor.

“It’s not apoplexy,” said Dr. Kittredge.

“What is it, Doctor? what is it?  Will he die?  Is he dead?—­Here’s his poor wife, the Widow Soper that is to be, if she a’n’t a’ready”

“Do be quiet, my good woman,” said Dr. Kittredge.—­“Nothing serious, I think, Mrs. Soper.  Deacon!”

The sudden attack of Deacon Soper had begun with the extraordinary sound mentioned above.  His features had immediately assumed an expression of intense pain, his eyes staring wildly, and, clapping his hands to his face, he had rocked his head backward and forward in speechless agony.

At the Doctor’s sharp appeal the Deacon lifted his head.

“It’s all right,” said the Doctor, as soon as he saw his face.  “The Deacon had a smart attack of neuralgic pain.  That ’s all.  Very severe, but not at all dangerous.”

The Doctor kept his countenance, but his diaphragm was shaking the change in iris waistcoat-pockets with subterranean laughter.  He had looked through his spectacles and seen at once what had happened.  The Deacon, not being in the habit of taking his nourishment in the congealed state, had treated the ice-cream as a pudding of a rare species, and, to make sure of doing himself justice in its distribution, had taken a large mouthful of it without the least precaution.  The consequence was a sensation as if a dentist were killing the nerves of twenty-five teeth at once with hot irons, or cold ones, which would hurt rather worse.

The Deacon swallowed something with a spasmodic effort, and recovered pretty soon and received the congratulations of his friends.  There were different versions of the expressions he had used at the onset of his complaint,—­some of the reported exclamations involving a breach of propriety, to say the least,—­but it was agreed that a man in an attack of neuralgy wasn’t to be judged of by the rules that applied to other folks.

The company soon after this retired from the supper-room.  The mansion-house gentry took their leave, and the two-story people soon followed.  Mr. Bernard had stayed an hour or two, and left soon after he found that Elsie Venner and her father had disappeared.  As he passed by the dormitory of the Institute, he saw a light glimmering from one of its upper rooms, where the lady-teacher was still waking.  His heart ached, when he remembered, that, through all these hours of gayety, or what was meant for it, the patient girl had been at work in her little chamber; and he looked up at the silent stars, as if to see that they were watching over her.  The planet Mars was burning like a red coal; the northern constellation was slanting downward about its central point of flame; and while he looked, a falling star slid from the zenith and was lost.