by.  It led by the door of the ladies parlour, and at the sound of women’s voices Dan halted.  For no other reason than that such voices always irresistibly allured him, he went in, putting on an air of having come to look for some one.  There were two or three groups of ladies receiving friends in different parts of the room.  At the window a girl’s figure silhouetted itself against the keen light, and as he advanced into the room, peering about, it turned with a certain vividness that seemed familiar.  This young lady, whoever she was, had the advantage of Dan in seeing him with the light on his face, and he was still in the dark about her, when she advanced swiftly upon him, holding out her hand.

“You don’t seem to know your old friends, Mr. Mavering,” and the manly tones left him no doubt.

He felt a rush of gladness, and he clasped her hand and clung to it as if he were not going to let it go again, bubbling out incoherencies of pleasure at meeting her.  “Why, Miss Anderson!  You here?  What a piece of luck!  Of course I couldn’t see you against the window—­make you out!  But something looked familiar—­and the way you turned!  And when you started toward me!  I’m awfully glad!  When—­where are you—­that is—­”

Miss Anderson kept laughing with him, and bubbled back that she was very glad too, and she was staying with her aunt in that hotel, and they had been there a month, and didn’t he think Washington was charming?  But it was too bad he had just got there with that blizzard.  The weather had been perfectly divine till the day before yesterday.

He took the spray of forceythia out of his buttonhole.  “I can believe it.  I found this in one, of the squares, and I think it belongs to you.”  He. offered it with a bow and a laugh, and she took it in the same humour.

“What is the language of forceythia?” she asked.

“It has none—­only expressive silence, you know.”

A middle-aged lady came in, and Miss Anderson said, “My aunt, Mr. Mavering.”

“Mr. Mavering will hardly remember me,” said the lady, giving him her hand.  He protested that he should indeed, but she had really made but a vague impression upon him at Campobello.  He knew that she was there with Miss Anderson; he had been polite to her as he was to all women; but he had not noticed her much, and in his heart he had a slight for her, as compared with the Boston people he was more naturally thrown with; he certainly had not remembered that she was a little hard of hearing.

Miss Van Hook was in a steel-grey effect of dress, and, she had carried this up into her hair, of which she worn two short vertical curls on each temple.

She did not sit down, and Dan perceived that the ladies were going out.  In her tailor-made suit of close-fitting serge and her Paris bonnet, carried like a crest on her pretty little head, Miss Anderson was charming.  She had a short veil that came across the base of her lively nose, and left her mouth and chin to make the most of themselves, unprejudiced by its irregularity.