“Let him go away—­whoever they are,” said Alma.

Another and more peremptory ring forbade them refuge in this simple expedient.

“Oh, dear! what shall we do?  Perhaps it’s a despatch.”

The conjecture moved Alma to no more than a rigid stare.  “I shall not go,” she said.  A third ring more insistent than the others followed, and she said:  “You go ahead, mamma, and I’ll come behind to scream if it’s anybody.  We can look through the side-lights at the door first.”

Mrs. Leighton fearfully led the way from the back chamber where they bad been sitting, and slowly descended the stairs.  Alma came behind and turned up the hall gas-jet with a sudden flash that made them both jump a little.  The gas inside rendered it more difficult to tell who was on the threshold, but Mrs. Leighton decided from a timorous peep through the scrims that it was a lady and gentleman.  Something in this distribution of sex emboldened her; she took her life in her hand, and opened the door.

The lady spoke.  “Does Mrs. Leighton live heah?” she said, in a rich, throaty voice; and she feigned a reference to the agent’s permit she held in her hand.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Leighton; she mechanically occupied the doorway, while Alma already quivered behind her with impatience of her impoliteness.

“Oh,” said the lady, who began to appear more and more a young lady, “Ah didn’t know but Ah had mistaken the hoase.  Ah suppose it’s rather late to see the apawtments, and Ah most ask you to pawdon us.”  She put this tentatively, with a delicately growing recognition of Mrs. Leighton as the lady of the house, and a humorous intelligence of the situation in the glance she threw Alma over her mother’s shoulder.  “Ah’m afraid we most have frightened you.”

“Oh, not at all,” said Alma; and at the same time her mother said, “Will you walk in, please?”

The gentleman promptly removed his hat and made the Leightons an inclusive bow.  “You awe very kind, madam, and I am sorry for the trouble we awe giving you.”  He was tall and severe-looking, with a gray, trooperish mustache and iron-gray hair, and, as Alma decided, iron-gray eyes.  His daughter was short, plump, and fresh-colored, with an effect of liveliness that did not all express itself in her broad-vowelled, rather formal speech, with its odd valuations of some of the auxiliary verbs, and its total elision of the canine letter.

“We awe from the Soath,” she said, “and we arrived this mawning, but we got this cyahd from the brokah just befo’ dinnah, and so we awe rathah late.”

“Not at all; it’s only nine o’clock,” said Mrs. Leighton.  She looked up from the card the young lady had given her, and explained, “We haven’t got in our servants yet, and we had to answer the bell ourselves, and—­”

“You were frightened, of coase,” said the young lady, caressingly.

The gentleman said they ought not to have come so late, and he offered some formal apologies.