Muriel did not see her mother again during the afternoon, and in the evening Mr. and Mrs. Eliot went out to a dinner of their bridge-club, leaving their daughter to dine in the too audible company of Robert. She dressed exquisitely, though not for Robert, whose naturalness at the table brought several annoyed glances from her. “_Can’t_ you manage it more quietly, Robert?” she asked at last, with the dessert. “Try!” “Whaffor?” he inquired. “Only because it’s so hideous!” “Oh, hush!” he said rudely, and, being offended, became more natural than ever, on purpose. She sighed. With the falling of the dusk, her whole being, not antagonized by her mother’s presence, had become an uplifted and mysterious expectation; and the sounds made by the gross child Robert were not to be borne. She left the table, went out into the starlight, and stood by the hydrangeas, an ethereal figure in draperies of mist. “Oh, You!” she whispered, and let a bare arm be caressed by the clumps of great blossoms. “When are you coming again, You? To-night?” She quivered with the sense of impending drama; it seemed to her certain that the next moment she would see him—that he would come to her out of the darkness. The young painter should have done so; he should have stepped out of the vague night-shadows, a poetic and wistful figure, melancholy with mystery yet ineffably radiant. “Mademoiselle, step lightly!” he should have said. “Do you not see the heart beneath your slipper? It was mine until I threw it there!” “Ah, You!” she murmured to the languorous hydrangeas. At such a moment the sound of peanuts being eaten, shells and all, could not fail to prove inharmonious. She shivered with the sudden anguish of a dislocated mood; but she was Robert’s next of available kin and recognized a duty. She crossed the lawn to the veranda, where he sat, busy with a small paper sack upon his knee. “Robert! Stop that!” “I ain’t doin’ anything,” he said crossly. “You _are_. What do you mean, eating peanuts when you’ve just finished an enormous dinner?” “Well, what hurt is that?” “And with the shells on!” she cried. “Makes more _to_ ’em,” he explained. “Stop it!” “I won’t,” Robert said doggedly. “I’m goin’ to do what I please to-night, no matter how much trouble I get into to-morrow!” “What ‘trouble’ do you expect to-morrow?” “Didn’t you hear about it?” he asked. “Papa and mamma were talkin’ about it at lunch.” “I didn’t hear them.” “I guess it was before you came down,” Robert said; and then he gave her a surprise. “The painter was here this morning, and they got it all fixed up.” Muriel moved back from him a step, and inexplicably a dismal foreboding took her. “What?” she said.