Paddock saw them into the car, not sorry to be relieved of the long journey into town. Wayne said that he would drive himself, and when Paddock had bidden the young women good night, the minister turned and shook hands with Joe, who had been making sure of the rear light. Wayne leaned out to ask him what was the matter and saw Joe staring into the car with an odd look on his face. His hand went to his cap and he mumbled something which the noise of the engine drowned. Then he ran round and jumped to the vacant seat beside Wayne, where he crouched in silence throughout the journey. Occasionally Wayne checked the car’s speed to ask the chauffeur the way, and once Joe jumped out to investigate an ominous change in the throb of the engine; but Wayne was spared the familiar ironies with which Joe usually criticized his driving. The expression of Joe’s face at the car door and this subsequent moody silence puzzled Wayne; and as his memory sought to reconstruct in all its trifling details his encounter with Miss Morley at the Institute the fact that he had afterward seen Joe following the girl through the dusk as he sat with Wingfield pondering the orchestra’s affairs took precedence of every other incident of that first meeting. He heard the voices of the passengers occasionally, but he did not once turn his head. He was trying, for almost the first time, to drive the car carefully, and the effort began presently to vex him. “You take it, Joe,” he said. He repeated the address Miss Morley had given him, and Joe drove to it without comment, a boarding house in an unfashionable quarter at the edge of that anomalous borderland where the long line of dingy shops and tenements paused a little nonplussed before the broad open area in which cathedral spires and new smart dwellings strove, it seemed, to make peace with art and music as enthroned within the solid walls of the Institute. Wayne waited on the steps until Miss Morley and her companion had opened the door. The young women expressed their thanks cordially in the flickering light of the hall lamp. As he turned back to the car, the voice of Miss Morley’s friend was flung out by the closing door--“Jean!” Wayne bade Joe drive home, and shut himself in with her name. CHAPTER XIV A LIGHT SUPPER FOR TWO As Wayne entered his father’s house he saw with surprise that the little reception parlour, adjoining the drawing room, which was usually dark at this hour, was brilliantly lighted. His surprise increased as Mrs. Craighill appeared in the door and gazed at him without speaking. “Well!” he said. “Well!” she returned. “Just home from a party, are you? Where’s father?” She put her finger to her lips, and indicated the closed library door with a slight movement of the head. “He’s writing a speech or something. He had a stenographer come up right after dinner. I was _de trop_, so I have been waiting all this time for you to come home and amuse me. And you are very, very late, you bad boy.”