a battering at the door, and an influx of three youths and two
young women. It seemed that they had been having supper together--enough
supper to raise their spirits and to make them very sociable and
amiable. The Crevequers, having also had supper, were sociable and
amiable too, and Tommy got out more wine, and the room became blue with
smoke and full of laughter; and Tommy played his banjo, and Betty sang a
song which amused them all very much, and the three young men and the
two young women shouted the chorus. None of the other occupants of the
house seemed to be disturbed--they were probably used to it. The company
stayed late. These pleasant gatherings are hard to break up, and the
Crevequers' friends seemed attached to them. With the young man who had
drunk most wine Tommy made a bet and won it; it was a five-franc note,
and it was satisfactory as it changed hands to feel that the loser, in
his then state of warm generosity, did not at all miss it. Tommy did a
further stroke of business by arranging an evening of cards with this
gentleman for the following week. At last, with hilarious leave-taking,
the visitors departed, some to their rooms in the same house, some
elsewhere, all very merry and affectionate.

'It hasn't been a really busy day--not so very,' Betty remarked
presently. 'Why are we tired?'

'There seems to have been plenty to do, one way and another,' Tommy
said, still gently fingering the banjo-strings.

They spoke languidly. The tiredness of their faces seemed to slur over
the delicate discriminations that really existed between them. They
were, as a matter of fact, not quite exactly alike at ordinary times.
For example, Betty had a dimple, when she laughed, in her left cheek;
Tommy's indentation, rather fainter, was in his right. Both had blue
eyes glinting to grey, but the longer sweep of Betty's lashes made hers
oftener approach to black. When their eyes flickered from melancholy to
sudden laughter, as they did rather often, and usually on quite
unexpected and incongruous occasions, they had a trick of narrowing to
blue slits. The slant of the black brows of both was up, slightly, from
left to right; they were quick brows, that flickered a little with their
speech.

'Let's get on our dressing-gowns and brush our hairs,' Betty suggested.

She went into one of the two adjoining rooms, and returned with a red
dressing-gown and a hair-brush, and curled herself up in her chair.

'Tommy, you rea