Jeff said he would like to do that, and he asked at the door whether Westover was going to the tea at Mrs. Bellingham’s.  He said he had to look in there, before he went out to Cambridge; and left Westover in mute amaze at the length he had apparently gone in a road that had once seemed no thoroughfare for him.  Jeff’s social acceptance, even after the Enderby ball, which was now some six or seven weeks past, had been slow; but of late, for no reason that he or any one else could have given, it had gained a sudden precipitance; and people who wondered why they met him at other houses began to ask him to their own.

He did not care to go to their houses, and he went at first in the hope of seeing Bessie Lynde again.  But this did not happen for some time, and it was a mid-Lenten tea that brought them together.  As soon as he caught sight of her he went up to her and began to talk as if they had been in the habit of meeting constantly.  She could not control a little start at his approach, and he frankly recognized it.

“What’s the matter?”

“Oh—­the window!”

“It isn’t open,” he said, trying it.  “Do you want to try it yourself?”

“I think I can trust you,” she answered, but she sank a little into the shelter of the curtains, not to be seen talking with him, perhaps, or not to be interrupted—­she did not analyze her motive closely.

He remained talking to her until she went away, and then he contrived to go with her.  She did not try to escape him after that; each time they met she had the pleasure of realizing that there had never been any danger of what never happened.  But beyond this she could perhaps have given no better reason for her willingness to meet him again and again than the bewildered witnesses of the fact.  In her set people not only never married outside of it, but they never flirted outside of it.  For one of themselves, even for a girl like Bessie, whom they had not quite known from childhood, to be apparently amusing herself with a man like that, so wholly alien in origin, in tradition, was something unheard of; and it began to look as if Bessie Lynde was more than amused.  It seemed to Mary Enderby that wherever she went she saw that man talking to Bessie.  She could have believed that it was by some evil art that he always contrived to reach Bessie’s side, if anything could have been less like any kind of art than the bold push he made for her as soon as he saw her in a room.  But sometimes Miss Enderby feared that it was Bessie who used such finesse as there was, and always put herself where he could see her.  She waited with trembling for her to give the affair sanction by making her aunt ask him to something at her house.  On the other hand, she could not help feeling that Bessie’s flirtation was all the more deplorable for the want of some such legitimation.

She did not even know certainly whether Jeff ever called upon Bessie at her aunt’s house, till one day the man let him out at the same time he let her in.