Salina parted from the rover, and came into the house while Virginia was singing, throwing her bonnet negligently back, as she sat down.
"Why, Salina! where have you been?" said Virginia, finishing a strain, and turning eagerly on the piano stool. "We have been wondering what had become of you!"
"You need never wonder about me," said Salina, coldly. "I must go out and walk, even if I don't have time till after dark."
She drummed upon the carpet with her foot, while her upper lip twitched nervously. It was a rather short lip, and she had an unconscious habit of hitching up one corner of it, still more closely, with a spiteful and impatient expression. Aside from this labial peculiarity (and perhaps the disproportionate prominence of a very large white forehead), her features were pretty enough, although they lacked the charming freshness of her younger sister's.
Virginia knew well that the pretence of not getting time for her walk till after dark was absurd, but, perceiving the unhappy mood she was in, forbore to say so. And she resumed her task of entertaining Bythewood.
Meanwhile the nocturnal acquaintance from whom Salina had parted took a last look at the house, and shook his envious head darkly at the room where the light and the music were; then, thrusting his hands into his pockets, with a swaggering air, went plodding on his lonely way across the fields, in the starlight.
The direction he took was that from which Penn had arrived; and in the course of twenty minutes he approached the door of the solitary house with the dark windows and the dogs within. He walked all around, and seeing no light, nor any indication of life, drew near, and rapped softly on a pane.
The dogs were roused in an instant, and barked furiously. Nothing daunted, he waited for a lull in the storm he had raised, and rapped again.
"Who's there?" creaked the stridulous voice of good Mrs. Sprowl.
"_You know!_" said the rover, in a suppressed, confidential tone. "One who has a right."
Now, the excellent relict of the late lamented Sprowl reflected, naturally, that, if anybody had a right there, it was he who paid her for his board in advance.
"You, agin, after all, is it!" she exclaimed, angrily. "Couldn't you find nowhere else to go to? But if you imagine I've thought better on't, and will let you in, you're grandly mistaken! Go away this instant, or I'll let the dogs out!"