“Oh, I shan’t dress this evening—­I shall just have some tea in the library after you’ve gone,” she answered absently.  “Your things are laid out,” she added, rousing herself.

He looked surprised.  “The dinner’s at seven.  I suppose the speeches will begin at nine.  I thought you were coming to hear them.”

She wavered.  “I don’t know.  I think not.  Mrs. Sperry’s ill, and I’ve no one else to go with.”

He glanced at his watch.  “Why not get hold of Dawnish?  Wasn’t he here just now?  Why didn’t you ask him?”

She turned toward her dressing-table, and straightened the comb and brush with a nervous hand.  Her husband had given her, that morning, two tickets for the ladies’ gallery in Hamblin Hall, where the great public dinner of the evening was to take place—­a banquet offered by the faculty of Wentworth to visitors of academic eminence—­and she had meant to ask Dawnish to go with her:  it had seemed the most natural thing to do, till the end of his visit came, and then, after all, she had not spoken. . . .

“It’s too late now,” she murmured, bending over her pin cushion.

“Too late?  Not if you telephone him.”

Her husband came toward her, and she turned quickly to face him, lest he should suspect her of trying to avoid his eye.  To what duplicity was she already committed!

Ransom laid a friendly hand on her arm:  “Come along, Margaret.  You know I speak for the bar.”  She was aware, in his voice, of a little note of surprise at his having to remind her of this.

“Oh, yes.  I meant to go, of course—­”

“Well, then—­” He opened his dressing-room door, and caught a glimpse of the retreating house-maid’s skirt.  “Here’s Maria now.  Maria!  Call up Mr. Dawnish—­at Mrs. Creswell’s, you know.  Tell him Mrs. Ransom wants him to go with her to hear the speeches this evening—­the speeches, you understand?—­and he’s to call for her at a quarter before nine.”

Margaret heard the Irish “Yessir” on the stairs, and stood motionless, while her husband added loudly:  “And bring me some towels when you come up.”  Then he turned back into his wife’s room.

“Why, it would be a thousand pities for Guy to miss this.  He’s so interested in the way we do things over here—­and I don’t know that he’s ever heard me speak in public.”  Again the slight note of fatuity!  Was it possible that Ransom was a fatuous man?

He paused in front of her, his short-sighted unobservant glance concentrating itself unexpectedly on her face.

“You’re not going like that, are you?” he asked, with glaring eye-glasses.

“Like what?” she faltered, lifting a conscious hand to the velvet at her throat.

“With your hair in such a fearful mess.  Have you been shampooing it?  You look like the Brant girl at the end of a tennis-match.”