arlor on Another Evening; how One Caller outsat Two,
and why; also, how Sharlee looked in her Mirror for a Long Time,
and why._

On the very night after West made his happy discovery, namely on the
evening of February 24, at about twenty minutes of nine, Sharlee
Weyland's door-bell rang, and Mr. Queed was shown into her parlor.

His advent was a complete surprise to Sharlee. For these nine months,
her suggestion that he should call upon her had lain utterly neglected.
Since the Reunion she had seen him but four times, twice on the street,
and once at each of their offices, when the business of the reformatory
had happened to draw them together. The last of these meetings, which
had been the briefest, was already six weeks old. In all of her
acquaintance with him, extending now over two years and a half, this was
the first time that he had ever sought her out with intentions that
were, presumably, deliberately social.

The event, Sharlee felt in greeting him, could not have happened, more
unfortunately. Queed found the parlor occupied, and the lady's attention
engaged, by two young men before him. One of them was Beverley Byrd, who
saluted him somewhat moodily. The other was a Mr. Miller--no relation to
Miss Miller of Mrs. Paynter's, though a faint something in his
_ensemble_ lent plausibility to that conjecture--a newcomer to the city
who, having been introduced to Miss Weyland somewhere, had taken the
liberty of calling without invitation or permission. It was impossible
for Sharlee to be rude to anybody under her own roof, but it is equally
impossible to describe her manner to Mr. Miller as exactly cordial. He
himself was a cordial man, mustached and anecdotal, who assumed rather
more confidence than he actually felt. Beverley Byrd, who did not always
hunt in pairs, had taken an unwonted dislike to him at sight. He did not
consider him a suitable person to be calling on Sharlee, and he had been
doing his best, with considerable deftness and success, to deter him
from feeling too much at home.

Byrd wore a beautiful dinner jacket. So did Mr. Miller, with a gray tie,
and a gray, brass-buttoned vest, to boot. Queed wore his day clothes of
blue, which were not so new as they were the day Sharlee first saw them,
on the rustic bridge near the little cemetery. He had, of course, taken
it for granted that he would find Miss Weyland alone. Nevertheless, he
did not appear disconcerted by the sudden discovery of h