Bessie saw that it was Jeff, and they stood a moment, looking at each other.  Jeff tried to free himself with an appeal to Bessie:  “I beg your pardon, Miss Lynde.  I walked home with your brother, and I was just helping him to get in—­I didn’t think that you—­”

Alan said, with his measured distinctness:  “Nobody cares what you think.  Come in, and get something to carry you over the bridge.  Cambridge cars stopped running long ago.  I say you shall!” He began to raise his voice.  A light flashed in a window across the way, and a sash was lifted; some one must be looking out.

“Oh, come in with him!” Bessie implored, and at a little yielding in Jeff her brother added: 

“Come in, you damn jay!” He pulled at Jeff.

Jeff made haste to shut the door behind them.  He was laughing; and if it was from mere brute insensibility to what would have shocked another in the situation, his frank recognition of its grotesqueness was of better effect than any hopeless effort to ignore it would have been.  People adjust themselves to their trials; it is the pretence of the witness that there is no trial which hurts, and Bessie was not wounded by Jeff’s laugh.

“There’s a fire here in the reception-room,” she said.  “Can you get him in?”

“I guess so.”

Jeff lifted Alan into the room and stayed him on foot there, while he took off his hat and overcoat, and then he let him sink into the low easy-chair Bessie had just risen from.  All the time, Alan was bidding her ring and have some champagne and cold meat set out on the side-board, and she was lightly promising and coaxing.  But he drowsed quickly in the warmth, and the last demand for supper died half uttered on his lips.

Jeff asked across him:  “Can’t I get him up-stairs for you?  I can carry him.”

She shook her head and whispered back, “I can leave him here,” and she looked at Jeff with a moment’s hesitation.  “Did you—­do you think that—­any one noticed him at Mrs. Enderby’s?”

“No; they had got him in a room by himself—­the caterer’s men had.”

“And you found him there?”

“Mr. Westover found him there,” Jeff answered.

“I don’t understand.”

“Didn’t he come to you after I left?”

“Yes.”

“I told him to excuse me—­”

“He didn’t.”

“Well, I guess he was pretty badly rattled.”  Jeff stopped himself in the vague laugh of one who remembers something ludicrous, and turned his face away.

“Tell me what it was!” she demanded, nervously.

“Mr. Westover had been home with him once, and he wouldn’t stay.  He made Mr. Westover come back for me.”

“What did he want with you?”

Jeff shrugged.

“And then what?”

“We went out to the carriage, as soon as I could get away from you; but he wasn’t in it.  I sent Mr. Westover back to you and set out to look for him.”