Eudoxia peered about among the tapestries and the sombre old furniture. "Yes, there she is over in the corner with Preciosa McNulty." Then she looked back toward Dill and sighed lightly. "I wonder how this thing is coming out? I wonder how I want it to come out? And I wonder how much responsibility I must really bear for the way it _does_ come out?" III She handed back her cup to Dill. "What are those two girls giggling about?" she asked him. Dill snatched a moment from his cares as host. Little had he expected to hear Virgilia Jeffreys taxed with giggling. Yet giggling she was,--with some emphasis and spirit too. She seemed to have slipped back from sedate and dignified young womanhood to mere flippant girlishness and not to have gained appreciably by the transition. Preciosa McNulty, still a girl and giving no immediate promise of developing into anything more, shared with her the over-cushioned disorder of the Persian canopy and giggled too. Preciosa could laugh and chatter easily, volubly, spontaneously--all this, as yet, was the natural utterance of her being. But Virgilia was keeping pace with her, was even surpassing her. Yet she showed evidences of effort, of self-consciousness, of serious intention; now and then the _arriere pensee_ disclosed its puckered front. This, and nothing but this, could excuse Virgilia to-day. For she was too old to giggle, far too learned, much too sober-minded. Dill himself felt this, and shook his head in reply to Eudoxia Pence's question, as he stepped away for a moment to accompany a pair of gracious amateurs to the door. A little figure that was passing rapidly along the corridor stopped on seeing the door ajar and waved a long supple hand and wagged a frizzly flaxen poll and gave a humorous wink out of his gray-green eyes and called unabashedly, before he resumed his skurrying flight: "I've got 'em on the run, Daff; I've got 'em on the run!" "Oh, that little O'Grady!" sighed Dill genteelly; "he is impossible; he will end with disgracing us. What can the fellow be up to now?" he wondered, closing the door, and preparing to return to his study of Virgilia Jeffreys. "Your poor grandfather!--can't I fancy him!" Virgilia was saying to Preciosa. She gave a light dab at the other's muff with her long slender hand. "Dear, puzzled old soul!"--and she crinkled up her narrow green eyes. "Can't you?" Preciosa laughed back. "'I don't know anything about such things,' grandpa insisted. 'Go and see Mr. Hill, young man, or Mr. Gibbons.' But the young man kept unrolling sheet after sheet. 'Grandpa,' I said, 'we shall miss the whole of the first act.' Then the young man _had_ to go. He didn't want to, but he had to." "The 'young man'!" laughed Virgilia, dandling a cushion. "Didn't he have any name?" "Some queer one: Ig--Ig----I don't remember." "Nor any address?" "Some far-away street you never heard of."