the whole evening
with that jay. He must have seen something of it in the beginning, and
she should tell him all the rest. She should tell him just how often she
had danced with the man, and how many dances she had sat out with him;
how she had pretended once that she was engaged when another man asked
her, and then danced with the jay, to whom she pretended that he had
engaged her for the dance. She had wished to see how he would take it;
for the same reason she had given to some one else a dance that was
really his. She would tell Alan how the jay had asked her for that last
dance, and then never come near her again. That would give him the whole
situation, and she would know just what he thought of it.

What she thought of herself she hardly knew, or made believe she hardly
knew. She prided herself upon not being a flirt; she might not be very
good, as goodness went, but she was not despicable, and a flirt was
despicable. She did not call the audacity of her behavior with the jay
flirting; he seemed to understand it as well as she, and to meet her
in her own spirit; she wondered now whether this jay was really more
interesting than the other men one met, or only different; whether he
was original, like Alan himself, or merely novel, and would soon wear
down to the tiresomeness that seemed to underlie them all, and made one
wish to do something dreadful. In the jay's presence she had no wish to
do anything dreadful. Was it because he was dreadful enough for both,
all the time, without doing anything? She would like to ask Alan that,
and see how he would take it. Nothing seemed to put the jay out, so far
as she had tried, and she had tried some bold impertinences with him. He
was very jolly through them all, and at the worst of them he laughed and
asked her for that dance, which he never came to claim, though in the
mean time he brought her some belated supper, and was devoted to her and
her aunt, inventing services to do for them. Then suddenly he went off
and did not return, and Mr. Westover mysteriously reappeared, and got
their carriage.

She heard a scratching at the key-hole of the outside door; she knew it
was Alan's latch. She had left the inner door ajar that there might be
no uncertainty of hearing him, and she ran out into the space between
that and the outer door where the fumbling and scraping kept on.

"Is that you, Alan?" she called, softly, and if she had any doubt
before, she had none when she heard