Daisy washed the dishes in a perfect whirl of energy, donned her high-heeled slippers and her Washington manner, and went off with John. It was late that night when Mrs. Flippin went out to find Mary busy. "My dear," she said, "what are you doing?" Mary was rolling out pastry, with ice in a ginger-ale bottle. "I am going to make some tarts. There was a can of raspberries left--and--and well--I'm just hungry for--raspberry tarts, Mother." III It was the Judge who told Becky that Dalton had not gone. "Mrs. Waterman is very ill, and they are all staying down." Becky showed no sign of what the news meant to her, but that night pride and love fought in the last ditch. It seemed to Becky that with Dalton at King's Crest the agony of the situation was intensified. "Oh, why should I care?" she kept asking herself as she sat late by her window. "He doesn't. And I have known him only three weeks. Why should he count so much?" She knew that he counted to the measure of her own constancy. "I can't bear it," she said over and over again pitifully, as the hours passed. "I think I shall--die." It seemed to her that she wanted more than anything in the whole wide world to see him for a moment--to hear the quick voice--to meet the sparkle of his glance. Well, why not? If she called him--he would come. She was sure of that. He was staying away because he thought that she cared. And he didn't want her to care. But he was not really--cruel--and if she called him---- She wandered around the room, stopping at a window and going on, stopping at another to stare out into the starless night. There had been rain, and there was that haunting wet fragrance from the garden. "I must see him," she said, and put her hand to her throat. She went down-stairs. Everybody was in bed. There was no one to hear. Her grandfather's room was over the library; Mandy and Calvin slept in servants' quarters outside. To-morrow the house would be full of ears--and it would be too late. A faint light burned in the lower hall. The stairway swept down from a sort of upper gallery, and all around the gallery and on the stairs and along the lower hall were the portraits of Becky's dead and gone ancestors. They were really very worth-while ancestors, not as solid and substantial perhaps as those whose portraits hung in the Meredith house on Main Street in Nantucket, but none the less aristocratic, with a bit of dare-devil about the men, and a hint of frivolity about the women--with a pink coat here and a black patch there, with the sheen of satin and the sparkle of jewels--a Cavalier crowd, with the greatest ancestor of all in his curly wig and his sweeping plumes. They stared at Becky as she went down-stairs, a little white figure in her thin blue dressing-gown, her bronze hair twisted into a curly topknot, her feet in small blue slippers.