Mrs. Waugh met her in the hall, took her hand, and said: 

“Oh, my dear Lapwing!  I’m so glad you have come back, bad as the weather is; for indeed the professor gives me a great deal of anxiety, and if you had stayed away to-night I could not have been answerable for the consequences.  There, now; hurry up-stairs and change your dress, and come down to tea.  It is all ready, and we have a pair of canvasback ducks roasted.”

“Very well, aunty!  But—­is Grim in the house?”

“I don’t know, my love.  You hurry.”

Jacquelina tripped up the stairs to her own room, which she found lighted, warmed, and attended by her maid, Maria.  She took off her bonnet and mantle, and laid them aside, and began to smooth her hair, dancing all the time, and quivering with suppressed laughter in anticipation of her “fun.”  When she had arranged her dress, she went down-stairs and passed into the dining-room, where the supper table was set.

“See if Nace Grimshaw is in his room, and if he is not, we will wait no longer!” said the hungry commodore, thumping his heavy stick down upon the floor.

Festus sprang to do his bidding, and after an absence of a few minutes returned with the information that the professor was not there.

Jacquelina shrugged her shoulders, and shook with inward laughter.

They all sat down, and amid the commodore’s growls at Grim’s irregular hours, and Jacquelina’s shrugs and smiles and sidelong glances and ill-repressed laughter, the meal passed.  And when it was over, the commodore, leaning on Mrs. Waugh’s arm, went to his own particular sofa in the back parlor; Mrs. L’Oiseau remained, to superintend the clearing away of the supper-table; and Jacquelina danced on to the front parlor, where she found no one but the maid, who was mending the fire.

“Say! did you see anything of the professor while I was gone?” she inquired.

“Lors, honey, I wish I hadn’t!  I knows how de thought of it will give me ‘liriums nex’ time I has a fever.”

“Why?  What did he do?  When was it?”

“Why, chile, jes afore sundown, as I was a carryin’ an armful of wood up-stairs, for Miss Mary’s room, I meets de ‘fessor a comin’ down.  I like to ‘a’ screamed!  I like to ‘a’ let de wood drap!  I like to ‘a’ drapped right down myself!  It made my heart beat in de back o’ my head—­he look so awful, horrid gashly!  Arter speakin’ in a voice hollow as an empty coffin, an’ skeerin’ me out’n my seventeen sensibles axin arter you, he jes tuk hisself off summers, an’ I ain’t seen him sence.”

“What did he ask you?  What did you tell him?”

“He jes ax where you was.  I telled him how you were gone home ‘long o’ Miss Marian; he ax when you were comin’ back; I telled him I believed not till to-morrow mornin’; then his face turned all sorts of awful dark colors, an’ seemed like it crushed right in, an’ he nodded and said ‘Ah!’ but it sounded jes like a hollow groan; and he tuk hisself off, and I ain’t seen him sence.”