years ago; and then, of a sudden, he went out to England, and came back with plenty of money, and since then he’s been an apostle and missionary among the poor.  That’s his winter work; the summers, as I said, he spends in the hills.  Most people are half afraid of him; for he’s one you’ll get the blunt truth from, if you never got it before.  But come, there’s the gong,—­ugh! how they batter it! and we must get through tea and out upon the balcony, to see the sunset and the ’purple light.’  There’s no time now, girls, for blue grenadines; and it’s always vulgar to come out in a hurry with dress in a strange place.”  And Mrs. Linceford gave a last touch to her hair, straightened the things on her dressing-table, shut down the lid of a box, and led the way from the room.

Out upon the balcony they watched the long, golden going down of the sun, and the creeping shadows, and the purple half-light, and the after-smile upon the crests.  And then the heaven gathered itself in its night stillness, and the mountains were grand in the soft gloom, until the full moon came up over Washington.

There had been a few words of recognition with the Thoresby party, and then our little group had betaken itself to the eastern end of the piazza.  After a while, one by one, the others strayed away, and they were left almost alone.  There was a gathering and a sound of voices about the drawing-room, and presently came the tones of the piano, struck merrily.  They jarred, somehow, too; for the ringing, thrilling notes of a horn, blown below, had just gone down the diminishing echoes from cliff to cliff, and died into a listening silence, away over, one could not tell where, beyond the mysterious ramparts.

“It’s getting cold,” said Jeannie impatiently.  “I think we’ve stayed here long enough.  Augusta, don’t you mean to get a proper shawl, and put some sort of lace thing on your head, and come in with us for a look, at least, at the hop?  Come, Nell; come, Leslie; you might as well be at home as in a place like this, if you’re only going to mope.”

“It seems to me,” said Leslie, more to herself than to Jeannie, looking over upon the curves and ridges and ravines of Mount Washington, showing vast and solemn under the climbing moon, “as if we had got into a cathedral!”

“And the ‘great nerve’ was being touched!  Well,—­that don’t make me shiver.  Besides, I didn’t come here to shiver.  I’ve come to have a right good time; and to look at the mountains—­as much as is reasonable.”

It was a pretty good definition of what Jeannie Hadden thought she had come into the world for.  There was subtle indication in it, also, that the shadow of some doubt had not failed to touch her either, and that this with her was less a careless instinct than a resolved conclusion.

Elinor, in her happy good-humor, was ready for either thing:  to stay in the night splendor longer, or to go in.  It ended in their going in.  Outside, the moon wheeled on in her long southerly circuit, the stars trembled in their infinite depths, and the mountains abided in awful might.  Within was a piano tinkle of gay music, and demi-toilette, and demi-festival,—­the poor, abridged reproduction of city revelry in the inadequate parlor of an unpretending mountain-house, on a three-ply carpet.