coat and camisole, a tail of hair down her back. If ever she had looked offended, she looked offended now.
"Nick, you don't mean to tell me!"
Ernest appeared at the top of the stairs in nightshirt and dressing-gown, the cat Sasha rubbing herself against his legs.
"What's this new trouble?" he demanded.
Augusta on the stairs, midway between the brothers, answered: "Some scrape of Eden's. I'm afraid that Ware girl has been leading him into mischief. Nicholas does get so excited."
Just as they drew together at the bottom of the stairs, and Nicholas was demanding to see Eden's letter, and Augusta was declaring that she had always expected something like this, and Ernest was saying what a blessing it was that Mama had not lived to see this night, and Nicholas was retorting that no one enjoyed a to-do better than Mama, quick steps were heard in the porch and the door was opened by Renny.
Before he had seen her, Alayne fled down the hall. She could not face him there before the others. She would escape to her room and not see him before morning.
She heard his question: "What's up?" She heard Nicholas put the situation pithily before him. He made no audible comment, but she could picture his expression, how the rust-red eyebrows would fly up, the brown eyes blaze. Then she heard Augusta's voice.
"Alayne is here, poor girl. She is staying the night. Why, where has she gone? Alayne, dear, Renny is here!"
She did not answer. The door of Grandmother's room stood open; she stepped inside and drew it to after her. She was startled to find the night-light burning. By its faint radiance the room was revealed to her in an atmosphere of sombre melancholy; the tarnished gilt flourishes on the wallpaper, the deep wing chair before the empty grate, the heavy curtains with their fringe and tassels, the old painted bedstead, on the headboard of which perched, above the fantastically pictured flowers and fruit, Boney, his head under his wing.
