“Why, thank you, I believe I prefer walking.  But do let me have your carriage called,” and again he hurried himself into his overcoat and hat, and ran down-stairs, and the barker a third time sent forth his lamentable cries in summons of Miss Lynde’s carriage.

While he stood on the curb-stone eagerly peering up and down the street, he heard, without being able either to enjoy or resent it, one of the policemen say across him to the other, “Miss lynde seems to be doin’ a livery-stable business to-night.”

Almost at the moment a carriage drove up, and he recognized Miss Lynde’s coachman, who recognized him.

“Just got back, sor,” he whispered, and a minute later Bessie came daintily out over the carpeted way with her aunt.

“How good of you!” she said, and “Good-night, Mr. Westover,” said Miss Lynde, with an implication in her voice that virtue was peculiarly its own reward for those who performed any good office for her or hers.

Westover shut them in, the carriage rolled off, and he started on his homeward walk with a long sigh of relief.

XXXIV.

Bessie asked the sleepy man who opened her aunt’s door whether her brother had come in yet, and found that he had not.  She helped her aunt off up-stairs with her maid, and when she came down again she sent the man to bed; she told him she was going to sit up and she would let her brother in.  The caprices of Alan’s latch-key were known to all the servants, and the man understood what she, meant.  He said he had left a light in the reception-room and there was a fire there; and Bessie tripped on down from the library floor, where she had met him.  She had put off her ball dress and had slipped into the simplest and easiest of breakfast frocks, which was by no means plain.  Bessie had no plain frocks for any hour of the day; her frocks all expressed in stuff and style and color, and the bravery of their flying laces and ribbons, the audacity of spirit with which she was herself chicqued together, as she said.  This one she had on now was something that brightened her dull complexion, and brought out the best effect of her eyes and mouth, and seemed the effluence of her personal dash and grace.  It made the most of her, and she liked it beyond all her other negligees for its complaisance.

She got a book, and sat down in a long, low chair before the fire and crossed her pretty slippers on the warm hearth.  It was a quarter after three by the clock on the mantel; but she had never felt more eagerly awake.  The party had not been altogether to her mind, up to midnight, but after that it had been a series of rapid and vivid emotions, which continued themselves still in the tumult of her nerves, and seemed to demand an indefinite sequence of experience.  She did not know what state her brother might be in when he came home; she had not seen anything of him after she first went out to supper; till then, though,