“If I only could!” sighed Evelyn.  “I’m so afraid they won’t think I can.”

“They will, if you think you can,” asserted Jeff.  “You’re up to it, aren’t you?  You needn’t do a thing.  Six of the crowd are going to give a little play.  I’ll get the load started home early, and we’ll come back flying.  Be here by midnight at the latest.  It’ll do you good, I know it will.”

“O Mrs. Churchill!” breathed Evelyn, as Charlotte appeared from the hall.

“O Evelyn Lee!” answered Charlotte, smiling back at the eager face.  “Yes, I heard most of it, Jeff, for I was coming down-stairs, and you weren’t exactly whispering.  It’s an enticing plan, isn’t it?”

“Of course it is.  And it’s magnificent weather for the affair.  Not cold a bit and no wind; moonlight due if no clouds come up.  Evelyn can’t get cold.  I’ll keep her done up to the tip of her nose, and be so devoted nobody else will have a chance to worry her.  Say she may go.  Don’t you see the disappointment would be worse for her than the trip?”

“You artful pleader, I’m not sure but it would.  If Doctor Churchill agrees, Evelyn, I’ll let you try it.  On one condition, Jeff—­that you really do get back by midnight.  For a girl who has been put to bed for weeks at nine that’s late enough.”

Evelyn went about all day with a lighter step than her friends had yet seen her assume.

“Now remember, I trust her absolutely to your care,” Charlotte said to Jeff that evening, as he appeared, his arms full of accessories for making his charge comfortable.

Evelyn, in furs and heavy coat, smiled at her escort.  “I’m not a bit afraid,” she said.  “Oh, what a beautiful night!  The moon is out.  Is that the sleigh coming up the street now, with all those horns?  What fun!”

“I want to put Miss Lee right in the middle of everything!” Jeff called out, as the sleighload stopped.  “I’m particularly requested not to let a breath of frost strike her.”

“Come on, here’s just the spot,” answered Carolyn Houghton, holding out a welcoming hand; and then the girl from the South, who had never known the sleighing-party of the North, found herself being whirled away over the road, to an accompaniment of youthful merriment, bursts of songs and tooting of horns.

Before it seemed possible the twelve miles of fine sleighing had been covered, and the old farmhouse, its door flung hospitably open at the sound of the horns, was invaded by the gay band.

Evelyn, in a quaint up-stairs bedroom, lighted by kerosene lamps and warmed by a roaring wood fire in an old-fashioned box stove, was attended by Carolyn Houghton, who was, as Jeff had said, a “jolly girl to know.”  Herself a blooming maid with black locks and carnation cheeks, Carolyn admired intensely Evelyn’s auburn hair and fair complexion.

“Don’t you think she’s the dearest thing?” she whispered to a friend, as they descended the stairs.  “There’s something so soft and sweet and ladylike about her, as if nobody could be slangy or loud before her, you know.  Yet she isn’t a bit dull; she just sparkles when you get her interested and happy.  I do want her to have a good time to-night.”