WHEN Seth awoke next morning, the position of the shadow cast by the thick green-paper curtain which covered the upper half of his window, told his practised faculties that it was very late, and impelled him to get out of bed, before he began at all to remember the several momentous events of the previous evening. As he dressed he strove to get these arranged in their proper order in his mind. Curiously enough there were certain inchoate recollections of feminine screams, of bursts of hysterical sobbing, of low but rough and strange male voices, doleful and haunting, which confusedly struggled for place in his sleepy thoughts, and seemed now to be a part of the evening’s occurrences, now to belong to this present morning, and to have come to him while he was nearing the end of his sleep. As he passed his Aunt Sabrina’s door on his way to the stairs, he heard from within this same sound of suppressed weeping. This much at least of the unlocated recollections must have belonged to the first stages of his waking. “Another quarrel with Isabel!” he thought, as he descended the stairs. “Why is it that women must always be rowing it with each other!” Then his own dispute with Albert came fresh and overpowering in distinctness of impression across his mind, and the grounds of his grievance against the temper of the other sex faded away. The living-room was vacant--the breakfast table still standing in the disorder of a meal just finished, and the shades down as though the day had not yet begun, although the clock showed it to be past ten. One of the folding doors of the parlor was open and he heard Isabel’s voice--it struck him as being strangely altered toward harshness of fibre--calling him to enter. She stood, as he remembered her once before, in front of the piano. In the dusk of the drawn curtains--how gloomy and distrait everything about the house was this morning!--her figure was not very clearly visible, but her face was so pale that it seemed to be independent of any light. Her eyes had the effect of slight distention, and, in the shadow, were singularly dark of tint. They were gazing at him with a strange, intent, troubled look, and the expression of the pallid face went with this to disturb him vaguely. He said to himself, in the moment of waiting for her to speak, that he must keep his troth with Annie resolutely in mind, and, if needs be, not shrink from avowing and standing by it. Isabel did not offer him her hand, or tender him any greeting whatever; only looked him through and through with that searching, unaccustomed gaze. “I wouldn’t let them call you,” she said at last, speaking slowly, as if with an effort to both form these words, and repress others. “I knew that you needed the sleep.” “I am sorry if I put anybody out by my laziness. But it is such a relief to be able to sleep like that once in a while, instead of having to get down to the office by eight.”