"You mustn't say these things to me," said Carlisle, feeling her anger to be real enough now. "I won't permit them. And--"
"You don't imagine that I say them for pleasure," the tall doctor interrupted hurriedly. "I'm compelled to speak the truth, however disagreeable--"
"Indeed? I've not noticed that you feel bound by any necessity that way."
To that he made no reply at all. But she saw, by the look he wore, that he was doing his best to convict her once again of having said something unfair and rather cheap and horrid....
Turning from him, she delivered the coup de grâce, in a voice not quite so firm as she would have wished:
"I don't wish to talk to you any more. You must not speak to me again...."
And she added at once, to a more congenial audience: "Oh!"
"Oh, oh! Cally!" whispered Mattie Allen, turning simultaneously, and for the first time, from Mr. Canning.
And Mr. Canning said: "Ah!--what's happened?..."
In almost the same moment all three had become aware that the rattle of talk and laughter outside the little room had entirely died away. There had fallen upon the house of gaiety a strange silence, in which a pin-fall might almost have been heard, and the slow speaking of a single voice, the length of the house away, was heard most distinctly.
To neither of the two girls was this proceeding a mystery. They were familiar with the New Year's Eve rites, and Mattie, after a number of pretty _Sh-h-h_ gestures, whispered the explanation to Mr. Canning:
"They're reading out the Old Year. We must all go see it. It's so cunning and quaint...."
So conversation of all sorts was summarily suspended. Even whispers sounded loud in the sudden hush. The four young people moved toward the door. For a moment they had almost the air of a company of friends. Young Dr. Vivian, who was nobody's friend, stood back for Miss Heth to pass out; but, seeing that she lingered beside her gallant, he turned again silently after Miss Allen, who beckoned to him _sh-h_ingly, whose property he seemed mysteriously to have become....
The alien passed out of sight, limping. If his only party that year had gone rather badly with him, it was not less so with another. Behind him in the firelit den, Carlisle looked up at Canning, color coming back into her cheek, her breast rising and falling. The sight of him, all to herself again, was more than balm to a wound, more than harbors to storm-swept mariners.