She bore the congratulations and handshakes as best she could, but she whispered to her uncle that she was very tired and begged to be taken home as soon as possible. The Snows were left at their door and she and Foster Townsend and Nabby and Varunas rode back to the mansion together. Seymour Covell remained at the hall. He had promised to help in the “clearing up.” He suggested that he be permitted to walk home when the clearing up was over, but to this Captain Townsend would not consent. “Varunas will drive back for you,” he said. An argument followed, for Covell insisted that he might not be ready to leave for two hours or more and Gifford must not be kept from his bed so long. It ended in a compromise. Varunas was to drive the span to the hall once more, hitch the horses in one of the sheds at the rear, and return to the mansion on foot. “By the time you’re through, Seymour,” declared the captain, “you won’t want to do any more walking. You’ll be glad enough to ride. It won’t do the horses any harm to stand in the shed a warm night like this.” Esther went to her own room, almost immediately after her arrival at the big house. She was too weary even to talk, she told her uncle. Townsend announced his own intention of “turning in” at once. “No need for any of us to sit up for Seymour,” he added. “I told Varunas he needn’t, either. Seymour will do his own unharnessing. He is handy with horses and he’ll attend to the span; he told me he would.” So, within an hour after the fall of the final curtain, the Townsend mansion was, except for the hanging lamp burning dimly in the front hall, as dark as most of the other houses in Harniss. The lights in the town hall were extinguished just before midnight. The rattle of the last carriage wheel along the main road or the depot road or the Bayport road died away. From the window of the bedroom in their house on the lower road Mr. Tobias Eldridge peered forth for his usual good-night look at the sky and the weather. “Clear as a bell,” announced Tobias. “Never see so many stars in my life, don’t know as I ever did. Lights things up pretty nigh much as moonlight.” “Oh, come to bed,” ordered his wife, who was already there. “I never see such a man to sit up when there wasn’t any need for it. I’ll bet you there ain’t another soul wastin’ kerosene along this road from beginnin’ to end. Do put out that lamp.” Her husband chuckled. “You’d lose your bet,” he observed. “There’s a light in the Campton settin’-room. I can see it from here. Carrie ain’t home yet, I guess. Say, she looked mighty pretty up there on the stage to-night, didn’t she?” Mrs. Eldridge sniffed. “She done her best to look that way,” she said. “Paint and powder and I don’t know what all! If I was her folks she’d be to home before this, now I tell you. Put out that _lamp_!”