Hugh and Ariel, arriving, were met by the stillness. Hugh passed Ariel and looked in at the library. He surveyed the unoccupied room with some disconcertion. He hadn’t asked his mother to be on hand to greet Ariel, and Anne was probably off somewhere with Glenn and Prescott Enderly. There was no actual cause for complaint, but he was concerned for the impression the absence of welcome might make on the girl standing there at his back, pale and wordless under the brilliant impersonal light of the hall chandeliers. “Mother’s probably dressing for dinner.” He spoke with assumed assurance and liveliness. “I’ll show you your room. I’m pretty sure I know which ’tis. And Anne will come straight there the minute she gets in. She’s off somewhere skylarking, or—” he looked at his watch and amended, “probably dressing for dinner too. I’ll look her up in her room.” He went ahead, carrying the suitcases up the stairs. As he passed his mother’s and Anne’s doors he said something more, it didn’t matter what, in the hope that one of the doors would open and some one appear to make Ariel feel at home. But nothing so fortuitous happened. His resentment became actual when he had to feel for the electric-light switch in the guest room allotted to Ariel and was conscious that she had followed him in and was standing there in the dark as aware of the chill in the room as was he. They might at least have told Rose, the second maid, to have the lights turned on, and a fire blazing in the little marble fireplace. “Now I’ll go and hunt up my kid sister,” he promised, when he had found the switch. “She’ll be along right away to help you unpack and settle. Dinner’s very soon. You mustn’t dress for it unless you want to particularly. All right?” Ariel assured him that she was all right. And then, when the door closed on his back she breathed one deep breath of satisfaction. It was good to be alone, and to have, if only for a few minutes, a reprieve from the ultimately unavoidable meeting with Hugh’s family. It seemed days and days ago, not a mere few hours, since Hugh had taken her arm and hurried her through the jam of people and luggage surging under the great swinging letter C in the customs shed. As they had stood with the customs official whom Hugh had captured with what had every appearance of special secret powers—since although Ariel was almost the last person off the _Bermuda_, she was certainly the very first person to have her baggage passed on—Hugh had turned and looked down at her with his first concentrated attention. “Are you warm?” he had asked almost sharply. “No, of course not. It’s very col—d in the States,” she shivered out, taken unaware. “Yes. But you keep out the cold, you know, with warm clothes,” he said. “You don’t look at all warmly enough dressed. Is there another coat, a big overcoat, anywhere in your baggage? We’ll get it out.”