Dan felt it a hardship to part with them, but he prepared to take himself off.  Miss Anderson asked him how long he was to be in Washington, and said he must come to see them; they meant to stay two weeks yet, and then they were going to Old Point Comfort; they had their rooms engaged.

He walked down to their carriage with the ladies and put them into it, and Miss Anderson still kept him talking there.

Her aunt said:  “Why shouldn’t you come with us, Mr. Mavering?  We’re going to Mrs. Secretary Miller’s reception.”

Dan gave himself a glance.  “I don’t know—­if you want me?”

“We want you,” said Miss Anderson.  “Very well, then, I’ll go.”

He got in, and they began rolling over that smooth Washington asphalt which makes talk in a carriage as easy as in a drawing-room.  Dan kept saying to himself, “Now she’s going to bring up Campobello;” but Miss Anderson never recurred to their former meeting, and except for the sense of old acquaintance which was manifest in her treatment of him he might have thought that they had never met before.  She talked of Washington and its informal delights; and of those plans which her aunt had made, like every one who spends a month in Washington, to spend all the remaining winters of her life there.

It seemed to Dan that Miss Anderson was avoiding Campobello on his account; he knew from what Alice had told him that there had been much surmise about their affair after he had left the island, and he suspected that Miss Anderson thought the subject was painful to him.  He wished to reassure her.  He asked at the first break in the talk about Washington, “How are the Trevors?”

“Oh, quite well,” she said, promptly availing herself of the opening.  “Have you seen any of our Campobello friends lately in Boston?”

“No; I’ve been at home for the last month—­in the country.”  He scanned her face to see if she knew anything of his engagement.  But she seemed honestly ignorant of everything since Campobello; she was not just the kind of New York girl who would visit in Boston, or have friends living there; probably she had never heard of his engagement.  Somehow this seemed to simplify matters for Dan.  She did not ask specifically after the Pasmers; but that might have been because of the sort of break in her friendship with Alice after that night at the Trevors’; she did not ask specifically after Mrs. Brinkley or any of the others.

At Mrs. Secretary Miller’s door there was a rapid arrival and departure of carriages, of coupes, of hansoms, and of herdics, all managed by a man in plain livery, who opened and shut the doors, and sent the drivers off without the intervention of a policeman; it is the genius of Washington, which distinguishes it from every other capital, from every other city, to make no show of formality, of any manner of constraint anywhere.  People were swarming in and out; coming and going on foot as well as by carriage.  The blandest of coloured uncles received their cards in the hall and put them into a vast tray heaped up with pasteboard, smiling affectionately upon them as if they had done him a favour.