Lifting her very gently in his strong arms, while his mother kept saying she knew he’d let her fall, Tim carried her down and into the best room, where he set her in a rocking-chair, and brought a stool for her lame foot to rest upon, and then said he would go for her trunk, if she would give him her check.  There was something magnetic about Tim, and Eloise felt it, and was sorry when he was gone.  The world looked very dreary with the fog and rain outside, and the best room inside, with its stiff hair-cloth furniture, glaring paper and cheap prints on the wall—­one of them of Beatrice Cenci, worse than anything she had ever seen.  She was very fastidious in her tastes, and everything rude and incongruous offended it, and she was chafing against her surroundings, when Mrs. Biggs came bustling in, very much excited, and exclaiming, “For the land’s sake, they are comin’!  They are right here.  They hain’t let much grass grow.  Let me poke your hair back a little from your forehead,—­so!  That’s right, and more becomin’.”

“Who are coming?” Eloise asked.

“Why, Mr. Crompton and his friend.  I don’t know his name,” Mrs. Biggs replied, and Eloise felt a sudden chill as she thought of the figure she must present to them.

If she could only look in the glass and adjust herself a little, or if Mrs. Biggs would throw something over the unsightly slipper and the ankle smothered in so many bandages.  The mirror was out of the question.  She had combed her hair with a side comb which had come safely through the storm, but she felt that it was standing on end, and that she was a very crumpled, sorry spectacle in Mrs. Biggs’s spotted gown, with the handkerchief round her neck.  Hastily covering her foot with a fold of the wide gown, she clasped her hands tightly together, and leaning her head against the back of her chair, drew a long breath and waited.

She heard the steps outside, and Mrs. Biggs’s “Good-mornin’; glad to see you.  She is expectin’ you, or I am.  Yes, her laig is pretty bad.  Swelled as big as two laigs, just as mine was twenty years ago come Christmas, when I sprained it.  Tim brought her downstairs where she can see folks.  She’s in the parlor.  Walk in.”

Eloise’s cheeks were blazing, but the rest of her face was very pale, and her eyes had in them a hunted look as the young men entered the room, preceded by Mrs. Biggs in her working apron, with her sleeves rolled up.

“Miss Smith, this is Mr. Crompton,” she said, indicating Howard; “and the t’other one is—­his name has slipped my mind.”

“Harcourt,” Jack said, feeling an intense sympathy for the helpless girl, whose feelings he guessed and whose hand he held a moment with a clasp in which she felt the pity, and had hard work to keep the tears back.

Howard also took her hand and felt sorry for her, but he did not affect her like Jack, and she did not like his eyes, which she guessed saw everything.  He had a keen sense of the ridiculous, and the contrast between Eloise and the gown which he knew must belong to Mrs. Biggs struck him so forcibly that he could scarcely repress a smile, as he asked how she had passed the night.  Mrs. Biggs answered for her.  Indeed, she did most of the talking.