At the turning of the newel-post, when the way seemed altogether clear, a bevy of young women came down the stair, and I stepped back and hung my head and gave them precedence. They fluttered past, with only a glance for the spick-and-span new uniform--all save one. And when I looked up to find the reason it was flashing down upon me in scorching contempt from the eyes of Mistress Beatrix Leigh. She was standing on the next to the lowest step, leaning with one hand lightly on the stair-rail, and though she was at the instant the very spirit and image of the goddess of scorn and indignation, I never saw her when she was more distractingly beautiful or more to be desired. But she gave me little time to admire her. “They told me,” she said most cuttingly, “that there would be a Captain Page here to-night; one of our Virginia Pages come at this late day to his proper sense of loyalty. I could not tell them they lied, because I was their guest; and now--oh, Dick! how could you do it!” she ended, with a pitiful quivering of the sweet lip and a sudden upspringing of tears to the beautiful eyes. The human mind shuffles its cards quickly at such a crisis. Had my secret been my own, she should have had it there and then, and all would have been well. I knew I could trust her, notwithstanding the fact that she was Margaret Arnold’s friend--and her fellow-guest in the house across the square, I feared. But the secret was not mine, and with the second thought came the enlightening glimpse of how horribly it would distress and embarrass her if she should have even a hint of my true reason for this miserable masquerade. So I hung my head and refused to say the word which would have cleared me, though it broke my heart to keep silence, in the face of the lip-quivering and the tears and the reproachful exclamation. I could feel that the tears had been driven back and that the glorious eyes were flashing again when she went on. “You knew I should be here to-night, Mr. Page?” she asked, giving me the courtesy prefix for the first time in all our life-long knowing of each other. “No,” I replied dumbly. “How could I know it? Your letters told me nothing of this--of your coming to New York.” “Yet you saw me this morning,” she said accusingly. “I know now that I did; yet I could not believe it then--nor later, when I tried to think it out. You saw me?” “I did; and I have been telling myself all day long that I did not. I said it could not be. By so much, Mr. Page, your friends think better things of you than you think of yourself.” “That may always be true of the worst as well as the best of us,” I said, not knowing what else to say. She drew herself up proudly. “I never thought to have it to say for Mr. Richard Page. Will you be good enough to let me pass, sir?”