“You called her Miss Bailey,” Mrs. Cromwell explained. “She’s been married to Professor Bromley for two years.”
“What! Was that funny little old——” Cornelia checked herself; but the tactful mother had already turned away to speak to someone else. The daughter stood and gazed at the stiff little old-fashioned gentleman standing punctiliously arm-in-arm with his wife. “Oh, dear me!” Cornelia whispered.
Then she ran back, wide-eyed, to rejoin an anxious lad who had arrived late. “Look here,” he said. “You’ve missed another chance to let me meet your cousin. What did you run away like that for?”
“To learn something important,” Cornelia told him. “Come on;—I’ll get you through to Elsie somehow.”
For the unmasking of Elsie, that dreaded break in the spell, still postponed itself as the evening wore on. Her miraculous night continued to be a miracle to the end, and she was a girl grateful for wonders when she talked them over with her cousin in the big bedroom, after two o’clock in the morning.
“I never met such darling people in the whole world!” she declared. “I never knew——”
“What nonsense!” Cornelia laughed. “You must be perfectly used to being a sensation wherever you go, Elsie.”
“A ‘sensation’?” Elsie cried. “I?”
“Don’t tell me you don’t know it!”
“Cornelia, you don’t understand. Nobody was ever really nice to me at a party before to-night in my whole life.”