proper show of reason and self-restraint; "Mr. Van
Burnam may wish to ask me some questions."

"Of course, of course," acquiesced the other. "You are very right;
always are very right, I should judge."

As I did not know what he meant by this, I frowned, always a wise thing
to do in an uncertainty; that is,--if one wishes to maintain an air of
independence and aversion to flattery.

"Will you not sit down?" he suggested. "There is a chair at the end of
the hall."

But I had no need to sit. The front door-bell again rang, and
simultaneously with its opening, the parlor door unclosed and Mr.
Franklin Van Burnam appeared in the hall, just as Mr. Silas Van Burnam,
his father, stepped into the vestibule.

"Father!" he remonstrated, with a troubled air; "could you not wait?"

The elder gentleman, who had evidently just been driven up from the
steamer, wiped his forehead with an irascible air, that I will say I
had noticed in him before and on much less provocation.

"Wait, with a yelling crowd screaming murder in my ear, and Isabella on
one side of me calling for salts, and Caroline on the opposite seat
getting that blue look about the mouth we have learned to dread so in a
hot day like this? No, sir, when there is anything wrong going on I want
to know it, and evidently there is something wrong going on here. What
is it? Some of Howard's----"

But the son, seizing me by the hand and drawing me forward, put a quick
stop to the old gentleman's sentence. "Miss Butterworth, father! Our
next-door neighbor, you know."

"Ah! hum! ha! Miss Butterworth. How do you do, ma'am? What the ---- is
she doing here?" he grumbled, not so low but that I heard both the
profanity and the none too complimentary allusion to myself.

"If you will come into the parlor, I will tell you," urged the son. "But
what have you done with Isabella and Caroline? Left them in the carriage
with that hooting mob about them?"

"I told the coachman to drive on. They are probably half-way around the
block by this time."

"Then come in here. But don't allow yourself to be too much affected by
what you will see. A sad accident has occurred here, and you must expect
the sight of blood."

"Blood! Oh, I can stand that, if Howard----"

The rest was lost in the sound of the closing door.

And now, you will say, I ought to have gone. And you are right, but
would you have gone yourself, especially as the hall was full of people
who did not belong there?