ed with the
elapsing moments into an unreasoned terror of the effect of his
presence. "Perhaps Miss Birdseye won't like you," she went on, as they
waited for the carriage.

"I don't know; I reckon she will," said Basil Ransom good-humouredly. He
evidently had no intention of giving up his opportunity.

From the window of the dining-room, at that moment, they heard the
carriage drive up. Miss Birdseye lived at the South End; the distance
was considerable, and Miss Chancellor had ordered a hackney-coach, it
being one of the advantages of living in Charles Street that stables
were near. The logic of her conduct was none of the clearest; for if she
had been alone she would have proceeded to her destination by the aid of
the street-car; not from economy (for she had the good fortune not to be
obliged to consult it to that degree), and not from any love of
wandering about Boston at night (a kind of exposure she greatly
disliked), but by reason of a theory she devotedly nursed, a theory
which bade her put off invidious differences and mingle in the common
life. She would have gone on foot to Boylston Street, and there she
would have taken the public conveyance (in her heart she loathed it) to
the South End. Boston was full of poor girls who had to walk about at
night and to squeeze into horse-cars in which every sense was
displeased; and why should she hold herself superior to these? Olive
Chancellor regulated her conduct on lofty principles, and this is why,
having to-night the advantage of a gentleman's protection, she sent for
a carriage to obliterate that patronage. If they had gone together in
the common way she would have seemed to owe it to him that she should be
so daring, and he belonged to a sex to which she wished to be under no
obligations. Months before, when she wrote to him, it had been with the
sense, rather, of putting _him_ in debt. As they rolled toward the South
End, side by side, in a good deal of silence, bouncing and bumping over
the railway-tracks very little less, after all, than if their wheels had
been fitted to them, and looking out on either side at rows of red
houses, dusky in the lamp-light, with protuberant fronts, approached by
ladders of stone; as they proceeded, with these contemplative
undulations, Miss Chancellor said to her companion, with a concentrated
desire to defy him, as a punishment for having thrown her (she couldn't
tell why) into such a tremor:

"Don't you believe, then, in th