At last she heard the latch of the iron gate click.  She sprang up, tripped softly to the mirror, where she made a few of those feminine, flickering passes at her front hair and throat which are warranted to hypnotize the approaching guest.

The door-bell rang.  Miss Katie, in her haste, turned the blaze of the lamp lower instead of higher, and hastened noiselessly down stairs into the hall.  She turned the key, the door opened, and Mr. Tansey side-stepped in.

“Why, the i-de-a!” exclaimed Miss Katie, “is this you, Mr. Tansey?  It’s after midnight.  Aren’t you ashamed to wake me up at such an hour to let you in?  You’re just awful!”

“I was late,” said Tansey, brilliantly.

“I should think you were!  Ma was awfully worried about you.  When you weren’t in by ten, that hateful Tom McGill said you were out calling on another—­said you were out calling on some young lady.  I just despise Mr. McGill.  Well, I’m not going to scold you any more, Mr. Tansey, if it is a little late—­Oh!  I turned it the wrong way!”

Miss Katie gave a little scream.  Absent-mindedly she had turned the blaze of the lamp entirely out instead of higher.  It was very dark.

Tansey heard a musical, soft giggle, and breathed an entrancing odour of heliotrope.  A groping light hand touched his arm.

“How awkward I was!  Can you find your way—­Sam?”

“I—­I think I have a match, Miss K-Katie.”

A scratching sound; a flame; a glow of light held at arm’s length by the recreant follower of Destiny illuminating a tableau which shall end the ignominious chronicle—­a maid with unkissed, curling, contemptuous lips slowly lifting the lamp chimney and allowing the wick to ignite; then waving a scornful and abjuring hand toward the staircase—­the unhappy Tansey, erstwhile champion in the prophetic lists of fortune, ingloriously ascending to his just and certain doom, while (let us imagine) half within the wings stands the imminent figure of Fate jerking wildly at the wrong strings, and mixing things up in her usual able manner.

XVI

A DEPARTMENTAL CASE

In Texas you may travel a thousand miles in a straight line.  If your course is a crooked one, it is likely that both the distance and your rate of speed may be vastly increased.  Clouds there sail serenely against the wind.  The whip-poor-will delivers its disconsolate cry with the notes exactly reversed from those of his Northern brother.  Given a drought and a subsequently lively rain, and lo! from a glazed and stony soil will spring in a single night blossomed lilies, miraculously fair.  Tom Green County was once the standard of measurement.  I have forgotten how many New Jerseys and Rhode Islands it was that could have been stowed away and lost in its chaparral.  But the legislative axe has slashed Tom Green into a handful of counties hardly larger than European kingdoms.