he had kept himself straight, as he needs must; but she could not tell what happened to him afterward.  She hoped that he would come home able to talk, for she wished to talk.  She wished to talk about herself; and as she had already had flattery enough, she wanted some truth about herself; she wanted Alan to say what he thought of her behavior the whole evening with that jay.  He must have seen something of it in the beginning, and she should tell him all the rest.  She should tell him just how often she had danced with the man, and how many dances she had sat out with him; how she had pretended once that she was engaged when another man asked her, and then danced with the jay, to whom she pretended that he had engaged her for the dance.  She had wished to see how he would take it; for the same reason she had given to some one else a dance that was really his.  She would tell Alan how the jay had asked her for that last dance, and then never come near her again.  That would give him the whole situation, and she would know just what he thought of it.

What she thought of herself she hardly knew, or made believe she hardly knew.  She prided herself upon not being a flirt; she might not be very good, as goodness went, but she was not despicable, and a flirt was despicable.  She did not call the audacity of her behavior with the jay flirting; he seemed to understand it as well as she, and to meet her in her own spirit; she wondered now whether this jay was really more interesting than the other men one met, or only different; whether he was original, like Alan himself, or merely novel, and would soon wear down to the tiresomeness that seemed to underlie them all, and made one wish to do something dreadful.  In the jay’s presence she had no wish to do anything dreadful.  Was it because he was dreadful enough for both, all the time, without doing anything?  She would like to ask Alan that, and see how he would take it.  Nothing seemed to put the jay out, so far as she had tried, and she had tried some bold impertinences with him.  He was very jolly through them all, and at the worst of them he laughed and asked her for that dance, which he never came to claim, though in the mean time he brought her some belated supper, and was devoted to her and her aunt, inventing services to do for them.  Then suddenly he went off and did not return, and Mr. Westover mysteriously reappeared, and got their carriage.

She heard a scratching at the key-hole of the outside door; she knew it was Alan’s latch.  She had left the inner door ajar that there might be no uncertainty of hearing him, and she ran out into the space between that and the outer door where the fumbling and scraping kept on.

“Is that you, Alan?” she called, softly, and if she had any doubt before, she had none when she heard her brother outside, cursing his luck with his key as usual.

She flung the door open, and confronted him with another man, who had his arms around him as if he had caught him from falling with the inward pull of the door.  Alan got to his feet and grappled with the man, and insisted that he should come in and make a night of it.