It would have been a satisfaction to Susan’s pride to refuse.  She knew that Ella really needed her this afternoon, and would have liked to punish that lady to that extent.  But hurry was undignified and cowardly, and Stephen’s name was a charm, and so it happened that Susan found herself in the drawing-room at five o’clock, in the center of a chattering group, and stirred, as she was always stirred, by Stephen’s effect on the people he met.  He found time to say to her only a few words, “You are more adorable than ever!” but they kept Susan’s heart singing all evening, and she and Emily spent the hours after dinner in great harmony; greater indeed than they had enjoyed for months.

The next day she said her good-byes, agitated beyond the capacity to feel any regret, for Stephen Bocqueraz had casually announced his intention to take the same train that she did for the city.  Ella gave her her check; not for the sixty dollars that would have been Susan’s had she remained to finish out her month, but for ten dollars less.

Emily chattered of Miss Polk, “she seemed to think I was so funny and so odd, when we met her at Betty’s,” said Emily, “isn’t she crazy?  Do you think I’m funny and odd, Sue?”

Stephen put her in a carriage at the ferry and they went shopping together.  He told her that he wanted to get some things “for a small friend,” and Susan, radiant in the joy of being with him, in the delicious bright winter sunshine, could not stay his hand when he bought the “small friend” a delightful big rough coat, which Susan obligingly tried on, and a green and blue plaid, for steamer use, a trunk, and a parasol “because it looked so pretty and silly,” and in Shreve’s, as they loitered about, a silver scissors and a gold thimble, a silver stamp-box and a traveler’s inkwell, a little silver watch no larger than a twenty-five-cent piece, a little crystal clock, and, finally, a ring, with three emeralds set straight across it, the loveliest great bright stones that Susan had ever seen, “green for an Irish gir-rl,” said Stephen.

Then they went to tea, and Susan laughed at him because he remembered that Orange Pekoe was her greatest weakness, and he laughed at Susan because she was so often distracted from what she was saying by the flash of her new ring.

“What makes my girl suddenly look so sober?”

Susan smiled, colored.

“I was thinking of what people will say.”

“I think you over-estimate the interest that the world is going to take in our plans, Susan,” he said, gravely, after a thoughtful moment.  “We take our place in New York, in a year or two, as married people.  ‘Mrs. Bocqueraz’”—­the title thrilled Susan unexpectedly,—­ “‘Mrs. Bocqueraz is his second wife,’ people will say.  ’They met while they were both traveling about the world, I believe.’  And that’s the end of it!”

“But the newspapers may get it,” Susan said, fearfully.