back to town?"

"Yes, certainly. But don't come now! You mustn't be seen with me! I'm
not supposed to be in the house at all."

If Verrian's present mood had been more analytic, it might have occurred
to him that the element of mystery which Miss Shirley seemed to cherish
in regard to herself personally was something that she could dramatically
apply with peculiar advantage to the phantasmal part she was to take in
her projected entertainment. But he was reduced from the exercise of his
analytic powers to a passivity in which he was chiefly conscious of her
pathetic fascination. This seemed to emanate from her frail prettiness
no less than from the sort of fearful daring with which she was pushing
her whole enterprise through; it came as much from her undecided
blondness--from her dust-colored hair, for instance--as from the
entreating look of her pinched eyes, only just lighting their
convalescent fires, and from the weakness that showed, with the grace,
in her run through the wintry woods, where he watched her till the
underbrush thickened behind her and hid her from him. Altogether his
impression was very complex, but he did not get so far even as the
realization of this, in his mental turmoil, as he turned with a deep sigh
and walked meditatively homeward through the incipient thaw.

It did not rain at night, as it seemed so likely to do, and by morning
the cloudiness of the sky had so far thinned that the sun looked mildly
through it without more than softening the frozen surface of the pond,
so that Mrs. Westangle's ice-tea (as everybody called it, by a common
inspiration, or by whatever circuitous adoption of Verrian's phrase) came
off with great success. People from other houses were there, and they
all said that they wondered how she came to have such a brilliant idea,