He saw plainly her rebuff, though she did not put it in any salient way, choosing to let him suppose it a mere unconscious omission. But he preferred not to let it pass unnoticed. "Oho," he said, with surly force, while still keeping his arm crooked, and shoving it so prominently toward her that no further subterfuge was possible. "So y' ain't goin' to ketch on, hey? W'at's the reason? We can git 'long better. Come, now, _let's_." "No," said Claire, driven to bay. "I am very much obliged to you, but I don't need any help." "Oh! You'll go it alone. All right." But Mr. Slocumb did not look as if he thought it by any means right. His hard, brown face had clouded with sulky disapprobation. A little gleam of teeth had stolen out under his crisp, short mustache, with an effect not unlike what we see when an angry dog snarls. He felt offended, and this meant that he should either sting with his tongue or smite with his fists. But in the present case a fresh glance at Claire, whose profile was turned to him, made his spleen swiftly perish. Her cheek had got a deep tint of rose; he saw the liquid sparkle of one dark-blue eye, and the dense, rippling hair, chestnut threaded with gold, flowing above one faint-veined temple. '_Ain't_ she a stunner!' he thought. After that he forgot to be offended. They were now in a spacious hallway leading directly to the street. The panic had quite subsided. Knots of people were standing here and there, loudly discussing their late alarms. Some of the women looked and acted as if they were midway between mirth and tears. Most of the men seemed grave; a few were laughing, but in a nervous, furtive way. Along the centre of the broad passage pressed a line of people whom the shock had left too dispirited for further sojourn in the house. Claire, with her adherent, was among these latter. In quest of Josie, she scanned every face within her field of vision. She had already caught sight of more than one injured unfortunate, further back, where the rush on the lower floor had been most disastrous, and just before she and Slocumb had gained their present open quarters. On this account, rather than because of the wild stampede itself, she had quite lost desire to wait through the rest of the play. It was now her fixed design to regain Josie and urge the plan of an immediate return to Greenpoint. Her sense of having met her father's known wishes with overt disrespect had become an assailant self-reproach. The very harshness of the event which had so rudely broken in upon her enjoyment seemed to have borrowed its disrelish from the rebuke that she had known as waiting all along to shame her. Providence, for the time, had gone with her father; it had abetted him; it had been telling her, in stern terms of personal threat, how flagrant was her filial disloyalty.