A tall, stalwart figure came through the crowd amidst a storm of hand-clapping and of cheers. The maids of mediaeval France fluttered their long veils, and their young male contemporaries waved their velvet caps. It was a gentleman of sixty with a bunch of white whiskers on either jaw and a pair of flashing steel-gray eyes. He nodded brusquely here and there and looked about with a tight, fierce smile. "Hurrah! hurrah!" cried all the students, from the life class down to the cubes and cones. "Who is he?" asked Abner. "Why, that's Dr. Gowdy," replied his companion. "The ball would hardly _be_ a ball without him here. He has led the grand march more than once----" "A man of his age and dignity!" mumbled Abner. "--but he is late to-night, for some reason. He is one of the Academy trustees," she added. "Perhaps his patients kept him." Abner's tone implied that professional duties would set much more gracefully on such a figure than social diversions. "His patients?" "Yes. You said he was a doctor." "But not a doctor of medicine. A doctor of theology." "A minister?--a minister of the gospel?" "He is, indeed. And I----" "And you?" "I am one of his parishioners. I sit under him every Sunday." Abner was dumb. This professing Christian, this pattern of evangelicalism, could witness such things without pronouncing a single word of protest. "Is he going to dance?" he asked finally. "I think not. He is coming over here presently to sit with me, just as you have been doing. You shall meet him." Abner was dazed. Palmer Pence, doubtless, was here under protest; but this man, his superior in age, credit and renown, had apparently come of his own free will. He sat there staring at the smiling progress of the Rev. William S. Gowdy through the throng of jubilant students. He felt stunned, dislocated. It was all too much. "Well, well," he heard Mrs. Whyland say. He looked about at her and then out upon the clearing floor. "Well, well," said Mrs. Whyland once again. The wide, empty space before them was lending itself to a second grand entree, by a party of one. Clytie Summers had finally arrived. XIX Clytie came on with the brisk and confident walk that she had cultivated along the pavements of the shopping district, and she was dressed precisely as if about to enter upon one of her frequent excursions in that quarter on some crisp, late-autumn afternoon. She wore a very trig and jaunty tailor-made suit and a stunning little garnet-velvet toque. She tripped ahead in a solid but elegant pair of walking-shoes and was drawing on a tan glove with mannish stitchings over the back. The Boutet de Monvel girls, the contemporaries of Jeanne d'Arc, were immediately obliterated; Clytie became the most conspicuous figure in the whole big place.