glowed ardently, and that he leaned forward with
an impetuous rush of eager words.

"But there is time, Miss Billy--if you'd give me leave--to say--"

"I'm afraid I kept you waiting," interrupted the hurried voice of Alice
Greggory from the hall doorway. "I was asleep, I think, when a clock
somewhere, striking eleven--Why, Mr.--Arkwright!"

Not until Alice Greggory had nearly crossed the room did she see that
the man standing by her hostess was--not the tenor she had expected
to find--but an old acquaintance. Then it was that the tremulous
"Mr.-Arkwright!" fell from her lips.

Billy and Arkwright had turned at her first words. At her last,
Arkwright, with a half-despairing, half-reproachful glance at Billy,
stepped forward.

"Miss Greggory!--you _are_ Miss Alice Greggory, I am sure," he said
pleasantly.

At the first opportunity Billy murmured a hasty excuse and left the
room. To Aunt Hannah she flew with a woebegone face.

"Oh, Aunt Hannah, Aunt Hannah," she wailed, half laughing, half crying;
"that wretched little fib-teller of a clock of yours spoiled it all!"

"Spoiled it! Spoiled what, child?"

"My first meeting between Mary Jane and Miss Greggory. I had it all
arranged that they were to have it _alone_; but that miserable little
fibber up-stairs struck eleven at half-past ten, and Miss Greggory heard
it and thought she was fifteen minutes late. So down she hurried, half
awake, and spoiled all my plans. Now she's sitting in there with him, in
chairs the length of the room apart, discussing the snowstorm last night
or the moonrise this morning--or some other such silly thing. And I had
it so beautifully planned!"

"Well, well, dear, I'm sorry, I'm sure," smiled Aunt Hannah; "but I
can't think any real harm is done. Did Mary Jane have anything to tell
her--about her father, I mean?"

Only the faintest flicker of Billy's eyelid testified that the everyday
accustomedness of that "Mary Jane" on Aunt Hannah's lips had not escaped
her.

"No, nothing definite. Yet there was a little. Friends are still trying
to clear his name, and I believe are meeting with increasing success.
I don't know, of course, whether he'll say anything about it
to-day--_now_. To think I had to be right round under foot like that
when they met!" went on Billy, indignantly. "I shouldn't have been, in a
minute more, though. I was just trying to think up an excuse to come
up and send down Miss Greggory, when Mary Jane began to tell me