As the young people paused at the door, Judge Emery took a note-book out of his pocket and elaborately made a note. "Fifty-five minutes in eight days, Lydia," he called. At the end of a fortnight he proclaimed aloud that the record was too discouraging to keep any longer; he was losing ground instead of gaining. He had followed Mrs. Emery to her room one afternoon to make this complaint, and now moved about uneasily, trying to bestow his large, square figure where he would not be in the way of his wife, who was hurrying nervously about to pack Lydia's traveling bag. She looked very tired and pale, and spoke as though near a nervous outbreak of some sort. Didn't he know that Lydia had to start for the Mallory Valentine house-party this afternoon, she asked with an asperity not directed at the Judge's complaint, for she considered that negligible, but at Lydia for being late. She often became so absorbed and fascinated by her own managerial capacity that she was vastly put out by lapses on the part of the object of it. She did not spare herself when it was a question of Lydia's career. Without a thought of fatigue or her own personal tastes, she devoted herself with a fanatic zeal to furthering her daughter's interests. It sometimes seemed very hard to bear that Lydia herself was so much less zealous in the matter. When the girl came in now, flushed and guiltily breathless, Dr. Melton trotted at her heels, calling out excuses for her tardiness. "It's my fault. I met her scurrying away from a card-party, and she was exactly on time. But I walked along with her and detained her." "It was the sunset," said Lydia, hurrying to change her hat and wraps. "It was so fine that when Godfather called my attention to it, I just _stood_! I forgot everything! There may have been sunsets before this winter, but it seems as though I hadn't had time to see one before--over the ironworks, you know, where that hideous black smoke is all day, and the sun turned it into such loveliness--" "You've missed your trolley-car," said her mother succinctly. "Oh, I'm _sorry_!" cried Lydia, in a remorse evidently directed more toward displeasing her mother than the other consequences of her delay, for she asked in a moment, very meekly, "Will it make so very much difference if I don't go till the next one?" "You'll miss the Governor. He was coming down to meet those on this car. You'll have to go all alone. All the rest of the party were on this one." "Oh, I don't care about that," cried Lydia. "If that's all--I'd ever so much rather go alone. I'm never alone a single minute, and it'll rest me. The crowd would have been so noisy and carried on so--they always do." Her mother's aggrieved disappointment did not disappear. She said nothing, bringing Lydia's traveling wraps to her silently, and emanating disapproval until Lydia drooped and looked piteously at her godfather.