‘Now that interests me more than I can tell,’ cried Maude, with her eyes shining with pleasure. ‘Do please read us everything there is about that dear piper.’
‘Why so?’ asked her two companions.
‘Well, the fact is,’ said Maude, ‘Frank—my husband, you know—came to a fancy-dress at St. Albans as the Pied Piper. I had no idea that it came from Browning.’
‘How did he dress for it?’ asked Mrs. Beecher. ‘We are invited to the Aston’s dress ball, and I want something suitable for George.’
‘It was a most charming dress. Red and black all over, something like Mephistopheles, you know, and a peaked hat with a bell at the top. Then he had a flute, of course, and a thin wire from his waist with a stuffed rat at the end of it.’
‘A rat! How horrid!’
‘Well, that was the story, you know. The rats all followed the Pied Piper, and so this rat followed Frank. He put it in his pocket when he danced, but once he forgot, and so it got stood upon, and the sawdust came out all over the floor.’
Mrs. Hunt Mortimer was also invited to the dress ball, and her thoughts flew away from the book in front of her.
‘How did you go, Mrs. Crosse?’ she asked.
‘I went as “Night.”’