“All right,” Howard said.  “Miss Smith can send them back if she does not want them.”

The slippers were made into a parcel so small that Howard put them in his pocket and said he was ready.  It had stopped raining, and as the young men preferred to walk they set off through the park, laughing over their errand and the phase of excitement in which they found themselves.  Jack liked it, and Howard, too, began to like it, or said he should if the girl proved as good-looking by daylight as she had been in the night.

CHAPTER VI

AT MRS. BIGGS’S

Notwithstanding Mrs. Biggs’s prediction that she would not sleep a wink, Eloise did sleep fairly well.  She was young and tired.  Her ankle did not pain her much when she kept it still, and after she fell asleep she did not waken till Mrs. Biggs stood by her bed armed with hot coffee and bandages and fresh wormwood and vinegar.

“Do you feel like a daisy?” was Mrs. Biggs’s cheery greeting, as she put down the coffee and bowl of vinegar in a chair and brought some water for Eloise’s face and hands.

“Not much like a daisy,” Eloise answered, with a smile, “but better than I expected.  I am going to get up.”

“Better stay where you be.  I did, and had ’em wait on me,” Mrs. Biggs said; but Eloise insisted, thinking she must exercise.

She soon found, however, that exercising was a difficult matter.  Her ankle was badly swollen, and began to ache when she moved it, nor did Mrs. Biggs’s assurance that “it would ache more until it didn’t ache so bad” comfort her much.  She managed, however, to get into a chair, and took the coffee, and submitted to have her ankle bathed and bandaged and her foot slipped into an old felt shoe of Mrs. Biggs’s, which was out at the toe and out at the side, but did not pinch at all.

“Your dress ain’t dry.  You’ll catch your death of cold to have it on.  You must wear one of mine,” Mrs. Biggs said, producing a spotted calico wrapper, brown and white,—­colors which Eloise detested.

It was much too large every way, but Mrs. Biggs lapped it in front and lapped it behind, and said the length would not matter, as Eloise could only walk with her knee in a chair and could hold up one side.  Eloise knew she was a fright, but felt that she did not care, until Mrs. Biggs told her of the hat which the lady from Crompton Place had sent her, and that Sarah had said the young gentlemen would probably call.

“I’ve been thinking after all,” she continued, “that it is better to be up.  The committee man, Mr. Bills, who hired you, will call, and you can’t see him and the young men here.  I’m a respectable woman, and have boarded the teachers off and on for twenty years,—­all, in fact, except Ruby Ann, who has a home of her own,—­and I can’t have my character compromised now by inviting men folks into a bedroom.  You must come down to the parlor.  There’s a bed-lounge there which I can make up at night, and it’ll save me a pile of steps coming upstairs.”