e meal, she had been absent from the table,
on a telephone call. She always answered these summonses personally,
regardless of when they came, appearing to fear that otherwise she might
miss something.

"And who," she added, "is going to invite him to dinner?"

Mr. Heth explained, and said that nobody was. He'd only mentioned the
possibility if the fellow ever got troublesome, which was most unlikely.
His wife was a climber--social bug, you know. "Pays to know your man,
eh, Cally?..."

"I should say! And O'Neill's wife manages him?"

"Don't they always?" said he, pinching her little pink ear. And
thereupon he bethought himself of a thoroughly characteristic quotation,
which he rendered right jovially:

"'Pins and needles, pins and needles,
When a man marries, his trouble begins,'

"As the fellow says," concluded Mr. Heth; and so departed for The
Fourth National Bank. Mrs. Heth, reminding her daughter about being
fresh for the afternoon, glided to her writing-desk in the library.
Carlisle confronted three hours of leisure before the prospective Great
Remeeting. She went to the telephone, and called up her second-best
girl-friend, Evelyn McVey. It developed that she had nothing special to
say to Evey, or Evey to her. However, they talked vivaciously for twenty
minutes, while operators reported both lines "busy" and distant people
were annoyed and skeptical.

That done, Carlisle went to the upstairs sitting-room, and sat by the
fire reading a Christmas magazine, which had come out on Guy Fawkes day,
the 5th of November. Presently she slipped off her pumps the better to
enjoy the heat: and assuredly there is nothing surprising in that. It is
moral certainty that Queens and Empresses (if we knew all) dearly love
to sit in their stocking-feet at times, and frequently do so when
certain that the princesses-in-waiting and lady companions of the bath
are not looking. The telephone interrupted Carlisle twice, but she
toasted her arched and silken little insteps well, read three stories,
and thought that one of them was quite sweet. Where she got her hands
and feet she often wondered. They were so clearly neither Heth nor
Thompson. By this time her unwearied mother had gone out to "get in"
three or four calls; also an important Charities engagement at Mrs.
Byrd's, where Carlisle was to call for her in the car at five o'clock
_sharp_, for their visit to the Bellingham. Carlisle now became
conscious of a void, and