All at once she heard steps on the gravel walk. Who could be out so late. A bulky form emerging from the firs and coming along the walk below where she stood answered her question. It was Michael, the old night watchman. Were it not for fear of disturbing some one she would call to him, for she liked his funny Irish ways, and already they had become good friends. She went nearer the railing to watch him as he walked slowly toward West Cottage, and as she moved a board in the floor of the porch creaked. Michael looked up hastily, and descried her figure. He had been too long at St. Helen’s not to know that young ladies on porches at midnight usually meant mischief, and he hurriedly retraced his steps toward The Hermitage, rounded the cottage, and—truly Fate was unkind!—rapped on Miss Green’s instead of Miss Wallace’s window. So perfectly innocent was Virginia that she did not for one moment connect Michael’s return with herself. Miss Green’s room was on the other side of the cottage from her own, and she could not hear Michael’s quiet warning. Therefore, she was surprised and not a little startled when she found herself five minutes later enveloped in a strange light. She turned around quickly to see in the doorway Miss Green, clothed in a gray flannel wrapper, and armed with a miniature search-light, which always accompanied her on her night journeyings. Virginia felt a strange desire to laugh. Miss Green’s scant locks were arranged in curl-papers about her forehead; she still wore her spectacles; and the combination gave the sinister effect of a beetle. But the look on Miss Green’s countenance checked the unborn laugh. “What are you doing here on the porch at midnight?” Miss Green’s words were punctuated with pauses of horror. “Something inside of me said I’d feel happier out here, Miss Green.” Virginia’s honest eyes looked into Miss Green’s shrinking ones. Miss Green apparently felt uncomfortable. She wrestled again with that disagreeable sense of having been beaten. Slow as she was to perceive honesty, she could not doubt this girl who faced her with flushed cheeks and tear-swollen eyes. She stood aside, shivering in the night air, to let Virginia enter her room. Then she followed her. Once inside, she hesitated a moment, then locked the French windows, and slipped the key into her capacious pocket. Virginia’s unwavering eyes watched her. She cleared her throat nervously. “I need hardly remind you, Virginia, that it is highly indecorous for a young lady to stand on a porch at midnight in a kimono! Moreover, let us ever avoid all appearance of evil.” Then she went. Virginia heard her padded footsteps stealing down the stairs. Priscilla had, fortunately, not awakened. Virginia was too surprised to be angry. Had it really happened, or was it just a dream? She tried the French windows to make sure. They were securely locked. Then she laughed as she remembered Miss Green’s curlpapers and spectacles and horrified expression.