“Tomorrow night,” I gasped out.

“Very well.  Tomorrow night it is.  It’s the Adams’s, isn’t it, at the Club?”

I could only nod.  I was beyond speaking.  I saw it all clearly.  I had been wicked in decieving my dear Familey and now I was to pay the Penalty.  He would know at once that I had made him up, or rather he did not know me and therefore could not possibly be in Love with me.  And what then?

“But look here,” he said, “if I take him there as Valentine, the Familey will be on, you know.  We’d better call him something else.  Got any choice as to a name?”

“Carter” I said franticaly.  “I think I’d better tell you.  I——­”

“How about calling him Grosvenor?”. he babbled on.  “Grosvenor’s a good name.  Ted Grosvenor—­that ought to hit them between the eyes.  It’s going to be rather a lark, Miss Bab!”

And of course just then mother came in, and the Brooks idiot went in and poured her a cup of tea, with his little finger stuck out at a right angel, and every time he had a chance he winked at me.

I wanted to die.

When they had all gone home it seemed like a bad dream, the whole thing.  It could not be true.  I went upstairs and manacured my nails, which usually comforts me, and put my hair up like Leila’s.

But nothing could calm me.  I had made my own Fate, and must lie in it.  And just then Hannah slipped in with a box in her hands and her eyes frightened.

“Oh, Miss Barbara!” she said.  “If your mother sees this!”

I dropped my manacure scizzors, I was so alarmed.  But I opened the box, and clutched the envelope inside.  It said “from H——.”  Then Carter was right.  There was an H after all!

Hannah was rolling her hands in her apron and her eyes were poping out of her head.

“I just happened to see the boy at the door,” she said, with her silly teeth chattering.  “Oh, Miss Barbara, if Patrick had answered the bell!  What shall we do with them?”

“You take them right down the back stairs,” I said.  “As if it was an empty box.  And put it outside with the waist papers.  Quick.”

She gathered the thing up, but of course mother had to come in just then and they met in the doorway.  She saw it all in one glance, and she snatched the card out of my hand.

“From H——!” she read.  “Take them out, Hannah, and throw them away.  No, don’t do that.  Put them on the Servant’s table.”  Then, when the door had closed, she turned to me.  “Just one more ridiculous Episode of this kind, Barbara,” she said, “and you go back to school—­Xmas or no Xmas.”

I will say this.  If she had shown the faintest softness, I’d have told her the whole thing.  But she did not.  She looked exactly as gentle as a macadam pavment.  I am one who has to be handled with Gentleness.  A kind word will do anything with me, but harsh treatment only makes me determined.  I then become inflexable as iron.