the line should be drawn; other people
might not feel quite so safe.

All this time Captain Frank King was intently regarding Mr. Jacomb; and
Nan saw it. The smile died away from her face. She grew
self-absorbed; she scarcely lifted her eyes.

'Nan, what's the matter with you?' said her brother Tom to her,
privately. 'You're not going to cry, are you?'

She looked up with her frank, clear eyes, and said--

'I was trying to remember some lines near the beginning of _Faust_.
They are about a clergyman and a comedian.'

This was beyond Mr. Tom; and so he said nothing. But what Nan had
meant had been uttered in a moment of bitterness, and was entirely
unjust. Mr. Jacomb was not failing in any proper respect for his
sacred calling. But he was among some young people; he hoped they
would not think his costume coercive; he wished to let them know that
his youth also had only been the other day, as it were, and that he
appreciated a joke as well as any one. If his speech at the moment was
frivolous--and, indeed, intentionally frivolous--his life had not been
frivolous. He had never intrigued or cajoled for preferment, but had
done the work that lay nearest him. At Oxford he had toadied no one.
And his 'record,' as the Americans say, in that parish in the southeast
of London, was unblemished and even noble.

But he made a hash of it that evening, somehow. Nan Beresford grew
more and more depressed and disheartened--almost ashamed. If Frank
King had not been there, perhaps she would have cared less; but she
knew--without daring to look--that Frank King was regarding and
listening with an earnest and cruel scrutiny.

When the time came for their starting for the theatre, Nan disappeared.
Tom began to make a noise, and then the message came that, Please sir,
Miss Anne had a headache, and might she be excused? Tom made a further
noise, and declared that the whole thing must be put off. Go to see a
pantomime without Nan he would not. Then a further message came from
Miss Anne, saying that she would be greatly distressed if they did not
go; and so, after no end of growling and grumbling, Mr. Tom put his
party into two cabs and took them off. Nan heard the roll of the
wheels lessen and cease.

It was about half-past eleven that night that someone noisily entered
Nan's room, and lit the gas. Nan opening her eyes--for she was in bed
and asleep--beheld a figure there, all white with snow.

'Oh, Nan,' said this