Miss Vane looked from one to the other in sympathetic ignorance, but they did not explain, and she went on. “And if they should hear Lemuel's name, and put two and two together, and the talk should get to Sibyl--well, I thought it all over, until the whole thing became perfectly lurid, and I wished Lemuel Barker was back in the depths of Willoughby Pastures----” “I understand,” said Sewell. “Go on!” Miss Vane did so, after stopping to laugh. “It seemed to me I couldn't wait for Sibyl to get home--she spent the night in Brookline, and didn't come till five o'clock--to tell her. I began before she had got her hat or gloves off, and she sat down with them on, and listened like a three-years' child to the Ancient Mariner, but she lost no time when she understood the facts. She went out immediately and stripped the nasturtium bed. If you could have seen it when you came in, there's hardly a blossom left. She took the decorations of Lemuel's room into her own hands at once; and if there is any saving power in nasturtiums, he will be a changed person. She says that now the great object is to keep him from feeling that he has been an outcast, and needs to be reclaimed; she says nothing could be worse for him. I don't know how she knows.” “Barker might feel that he was disgraced,” said the minister, “but I don't believe that a whole system of ethics would make him suspect that he needed to be reclaimed.” “He makes me suspect that _I_ need to be reclaimed,” said Miss Vane, “when he looks at me with those beautiful honest eyes of his.” Mrs. Sewell asked, “Has he seen the decorations yet?” “Not at all. They are to steal upon him when he comes in to-night. The gas is to be turned very low, and he is to notice everything gradually, so as not to get the impression that things have been done with a design upon him.” She laughed in reporting these ideas, which were plainly those of the young girl. “Sh!” she whispered at the end. A tall girl, with a slim vase in her hand, drifted in upon their group like an apparition. She had heavy black eyebrows with beautiful blue eyes under them, full of an intensity unrelieved by humour. “Aunty!” she said severely, “have you been telling?” “Only Mr. and Mrs. Sewell, Sibyl,” said Miss Vane. “_Their_ knowing won't hurt. He'll never know it.” “If he hears you laughing, he'll know it's about him. He's in the kitchen, now. He's come in the back way. Do be quiet.” She had given her hand without other greeting in her preoccupation to each of the Sewells in turn, and now she passed out of the room. XI. “What makes Lemuel such a gift,” said Miss Vane, in a talk which she had with Sewell a month later, “is that he is so supplementary.” “Do you mean just in the supplementary sense of the term?” “Well, not in the fifth-wheel sense. I mean that he supplements us, all and singular--if you will excuse the legal exactness.” “Oh, certainly,” said Sewell; “I should like even more exactness.”