n Corby
spoke, who looked silently responsive.

"We're coming away so early," said Mrs. Barberry, buttoning her glove.
Hilda had begun to smile, and, indeed, the situation had its humour, but
there was also behind her eyes an appreciation of another sort. "Don't,"
she said to Alicia, in the low, quick reach of her prompting tone, as if
the other had mistaken her cue, but the moment hardly permitted retreat,
and Alicia turned an unflinching graceful front to the lady in the
Department of Education. "Then I think I must ask you," she said.

The educational husband was standing so near Hilda that she got the very
dregs of the glance of consternation his little wife gave him as
she replied, a trifle red and stiff, that she was sure she would be
delighted.

"Nobody suggests ME!" exclaimed Captain Corby resentfully. They were
gathered in the hall, the carriages were driving to the open door, the
Barberry's glistening brougham whisking them off, and then the battered
vehicle in Hilda's hire. It had an air of ludicrous forlornness, with
its damaged paint and its tied-up harness. Hilda, when its door closed
upon the purple vision of her, might have been a modern Cinderella in
mid-stage of backward transformation.

"I could chaperone you all!" she cried gaily back at them, as she passed
down the steps; and in the relief of the general exclamation it seemed
reasonable enough that Stephen Arnold should lean into the gharry to
see that she was quite comfortable. The unusual thing, which nobody else
heard, was that he said to her then with shamed discomfort, "It doesn't
matter--it doesn't matter," and that Hilda, driving away, found herself
without a voice to answer the good-nights they chorussed after her.

Arnold begged a seat in Captain Corby's dogcart, and Hilda, with her
purple train in her lap, heard the wheels following all the way. She
re-encountered the lady to whom she had been entrusted, whose name it
occurs to me was Winstick, in the cloakroom. They were late; there was
hardly anybody else but the attendants; and Mrs. Winstick smiled freely,
and said she loved the colour of Hilda's dress; also that she would give
worlds for an invisible hairpin--oh, thank you!--and that it was simply
ducky of her Excellency to have pink powder as well as white put out.
She did hope Miss Howe would enjoy the evening--they would meet again
later on; she must not forget to look at the chunam pillars in the
ballroom--perfectly lovely. So