waistcoat with a pleased and excited air that would have been in an older man the anticipation of a "lady-killer." He was not handsome; his features were too flat. But he was well-dressed and well-built, and he had the assurance of an easy manner. He accented, by contrast, Don's paleness, his angularity, and his student shabbiness; and by an exuberance of spirits he had the effect of increasing, perversely, Don's reserve.
They came, together, to the door of the old, "semi-detached," white-brick house, in which the Kimballs lived. Don let him ring, standing back himself on the edge of the porch to look at the lighted curtains of the window at which she had stood to see him pass on Sunday morning. And when a maid opened the door, Don followed in, under the crimson gas-globe of the hall, as reverently as if he had been entering a church.
Lights and laughter and the music of a piano invaded him with bewilderment almost at once. She parted the hangings of a doorway at his elbow, and greeted Conroy and him with a dazzlingly flushed smile, dressed as he had never seen her before, in a young girl's evening gown with elbow sleeves. She ushered them into a blazing room of gaslights and strange faces, and introduced them to a multitudinous company—of seven persons. Her mother, a small and pretty woman with young eyes, met them—in spite of a hoarse cold—with the bright friendliness that was habitual with her. Mrs. Kimball, without rising, lifted the drooped and puffy eyelids of a strong face,
