“Miss Saunders,” said Susan quickly, “will you tell Mrs. Fox that my headache is much worse.  I’m afraid I’d better go straight home—­”

“Oh, too bad!” Miss Saunders said, her round, pale, rather unwholesome face, expressing proper regret.  “Perhaps tea will help it?” she added sweetly.

It was the first personal word Susan had won.  She felt suddenly, horrifyingly—­near to tears.

“Oh, thank you, I’m afraid not!” she smiled bravely.  “Thank you so much.  And tell her I’m sorry.  Good-night.”

“Good-night!” said Miss Saunders.  And Susan went, with a sense of escape and relief, up the long passageway, and into the cool, friendly darkness of the streets.  She had an unreasoning fear that they might follow her, somehow bring her back, and walked a swift block or two, rather than wait for the car where she might be found.

Half an hour later she rushed into the house, just as the Thanksgiving dinner was announced, half-mad with excitement, her cheeks ablaze, and her eyes unnaturally bright.  The scene in the dining-room was not of the gayest; Mrs. Lancaster and Virginia were tired and depressed, Mary Lou nervously concerned for the dinner, Georgie and almost all of the few boarders who had no alternative to dining in a boarding-house to-day were cross and silent.

But the dinner was delicious, and Susan, arriving at the crucial moment, had a more definite effect on the party than a case of champagne would have had.  She chattered recklessly and incessantly, and when Mrs. Lancaster’s mild “Sue, dear!” challenged one remark, she capped it with another still less conventional.

Her spirits were infectious, the gaiety became general.  Mrs. Parker laughed until the tears streamed down her fat cheeks, and Mary Lord, the bony, sallow-faced, crippled sister who was the light and joy of Lydia Lord’s drudging life, and who had been brought downstairs to-day as a special event, at a notable cost to her sister’s and William Oliver’s muscles, nearly choked over her cranberry sauce.  Susan insisted that everyone should wear the paper caps that came in the bonbons, and looked like a pretty witch herself, under a cone-shaped hat of pink and blue.  When, as was usual on all such occasions, a limited supply of claret came on with the dessert, she brought the whole company from laughter very close to tears, as she proposed, with pretty dignify, a toast to her aunt, “who makes this house such a happy home for us all.”  The toast was drunk standing, and Mrs. Lancaster cried into her napkin, with pride and tender emotion.

After dinner the diminished group trailed, still laughing and talking, upstairs to the little drawing-room, where perhaps seven or eight of them settled about the coal fire.  Mrs. Lancaster, looking her best in a low-necked black silk, if rather breathless after the hearty dinner, eaten in too-tight corsets, had her big chair, Georgia curled girlishly on a footstool at her feet.  Miss Lydia Lord stealthily ate a soda mint tablet now and then; her sister, propped with a dozen pillows on the sofa, fairly glowed with the unusual pleasure and excitement.  Little Mrs. Cortelyou rocked back and forth; always loquacious, she was especially talkative after to-night’s glass of wine.