"Miss Hoffman, if you please!"

"Miss Hoffman. Don't be mean to me. I've only got an hour----"

"An hour! Do you imagine for one second----Why, I mustn't stay here.

This is really a farewell dance given in my honor. We go back East day after to-morrow. I must go in."

"Only one little hour. And I have come a long ways for my hour. They take their masks off at midnight--don't they? And of course I can't stay after that. I want only just to ask you----"

"Why did you come then? Isn't it rather unusual to go uninvited to a ball?"

"Why, I reckon you nearly know why I come, Miss Hoffman; but if you want me to say precisely, ma'am----"

"I don't!"

"We'll keep that for a surprise, then. Another thing: I wanted to find out just where you live in New York. I forgot to ask you. And I couldn't very well go round asking folks after you're gone--could I? Of course I didn't have any invitation--from Mr. Lake; but I thought, if he didn't know it, he wouldn't mind me just stepping in to get your address."

"Well, of all the a.s.surance!" said Miss Ellinor. "Do you intend to start up a correspondence with me without even the formality of asking my consent?"

"Why, Miss Ellinor, ma'am, I thought----"

"Miss Hoffman, sir! Yes--and there's another thing. You said you had no invitation--from Mr. Lake. Does that mean, by any chance, that I invited you?"

"You didn't say a word about my coming," said Jeff. He was a fl.u.s.tered man, this poor Bransford, but he managed to put a slight stress upon the word "say."

Miss Ellinor--Miss Hoffman--caught this faint emphasis instantly.

"Oh, I didn't _say_ anything? I just looked an invitation, I suppose?"

she stormed. "Melting eyes--and that sort of thing? Tears in them, maybe? Poor girl! Poor little child! It would be cruel to let her go home without seeing me again. I will give her a little more happiness, poor thing, and write to her a while. Maybe it would be wiser, though, just to make a quarrel and break loose at once. She'll get over it in a little while after she gets back to New York. Well! Upon my word!"

As she advanced these horrible suppositions, Miss Hoffman had marked out a short beat of garden path--five steps and a turn; five steps back and whirl again--with, on the whole, a caged-tigress effect. With a double-quick at each turn to keep his place at her elbow, Jeff, utterly aghast at the d.a.m.nable perversity of everything on earth, vainly endeavored to make coordinate and stumbling remonstrance. As she stopped for breath, Jeff heard his own voice at last, propounding to the world at large a stunned query as to whether the abode of lost spirits could afford aught to excel the present situation. The remark struck him: he paused to wonder what other things he had been saying.

Miss Ellinor walked her beat, vindictive. Her chin was at an angle of complacency. She turned up the perky corners of an imaginary mustache with an air, an exasperating little finger, separated from the others, pointing upward in hateful self-satisfaction. Her mouth wore a gratified masculine smirk, visible even in the starlight; her gait was a leisured and lordly strut; her hand waved airy pity. Jeff shrank back in horror.

"M-Miss Hoffman, I n-never d-dreamed----"

Miss Hoffman turned upon him swiftly.

"Never have I heard anything like it--never! You bring me out here w.i.l.l.y-nilly, and by way of entertainment you virtually accuse me of throwing myself at your head."

"I never!" said Jeff indignantly. "I didn't----"

Miss Hoffman faced him crouchingly and shook an indictment from her fingers.

"First, you imply that I enticed you to come; second, expecting you, I dressed to catch your eye; third, I was watching eagerly for you----"

"Come--I say now!" The baited and exasperated victim walked headlong into the trap. "The first thing you did was to ask me if I was lame?

Wasn't that question meant to find out who I was? When I answered, 'Not--very,' didn't you know at once that it was me?"

"There! That proves exactly what I was just saying," raged the delighted trapper. "You don't even deny it! You say in so many words that I have been courting you! I had to say something--didn't I? You wouldn't! You were limping, so I asked you if you were lame. What else could I have said? Did you want me to stand there like a stuffed Egyptian mummy?

That's the thanks a girl gets for trying to help a great, awkward, blundering b.u.t.ter-fingers! Oh, if you could just see yourself! The irresistible conqueror! Not altogether unprincipled though! You _are_ capable of compunction. I'll give you credit for that. Alarmed at your easy success, you try to spare me. It is n.o.ble of you--n.o.ble! You drag me out here, force a quarrel upon me----"

"Oh, by Jove now! Really!" Stung by the poignant injustice of crowding events, Jeff took the bit in his teeth and rushed to destruction.

"Really, you must see yourself that I couldn't drag you out here! I have never been in that hall before. I didn't know the lay of the ground. I didn't even know that little side room was there. I thought you pressed my arm a little----" So the brainless colt, in the quicksands, flounders deeper with each effort to extricate himself.

If Miss Hoffman had been angry before she was furious now.

"So _that's_ the way of it? Better and better! _I_ dragged _you_ out!

Really, Mr. Bransford, I feel that I should take you back to your chaperon at once. You might be compromised, you know!"

Goaded to desperation, he acted on this hint at once. He turned, with stiff and stilted speech:

"I will take you back to the window, Miss Hoffman. Then there is nothing for me to do but go. I am sorry to have caused you even a moment's annoyance. To-morrow you will see how you have twisted--I mean, how completely you have misinterpreted everything I have said. Perhaps some day you may forgive me. Here is the window. Good-night--good-by!"

Miss Hoffman lingered, however.

"Of course, if you apologize----"

"I do, Miss Hoffman. I beg your pardon most sincerely for anything I have ever said or done that could hurt you in any way."

"If you are sure you are sorry--if you take it all back and will never do such a thing again--perhaps I may forgive you."

"I won't--I am--I will!" said the abject and groveling wretch. Which was incoherent but pleasing. "I didn't mean anything the way you took it; but I'm sorry for everything."

"Then I didn't beguile you to come? Or mask as a Friend in the hope that you would identify me?"

"No, no!"

Miss Ellinor pressed her advantage cruelly. "Nor take stock of each new masker to see if he possibly wasn't the expected Mr. Bransford? Nor drag you into the garden? Nor squeeze your arm?" Her hands went to her face, her lissome body shook. "Oh, Mr. Bransford!" she sobbed between her fingers. "How could you--how _could_ you say that?"

The clock chimed. A pealing voice beat out into the night: "Masks off!"

A hundred voices swelled the cry; it was drowned in waves of laughter.

It rose again tumultuously: "_Masks off! Masks off!_" Nearer came hateful voices, too, that cried: "_Ellinor! Ellinor! Where are you?_"

"I must go!" said Jeff. "They'll be looking for you. No; you didn't do any of those things. You couldn't do any of those things. Good-by!"

"_Ellinor! Ellinor Hoffman!! Where are you?_"

Miss Hoffman whipped off her mask. From the open window a shaft of light fell on her face. It was flushed, sparkling, radiant. "Masks off!" she said. "Stupid!... Oh, you great goose! Of course I did!" She stepped back into the shadow.

No one, as the copybook says justly, may be always wise. Conversely, the most unwise of us blunders sometimes upon the right thing to do. With a glimmer of returning intelligence Mr. Bransford laid his noseguard on the window-sill.

"_Sir!_" said Ellinor then. "How dare you?" Then she turned the other cheek. "Good-by!" she whispered, and fled away to the ballroom.

Mr. Bransford, in the shadows, scratched his head dubiously.

"Her Christian name was Ellinor," he muttered. "Ellinor! H'm--Ellinor!

Very appropriate name.... Very!... And I don't know yet where she lives!"

He wandered disconsolately away to the garden wall, forgetting the discarded noseguard.