Miss Ellinor pressed her advantage cruelly. “Nor take stock of each new masker to see if he possibly wasn’t the expected Mr. Bransford? Nor drag you into the garden? Nor squeeze your arm?” Her hands went to her face, her lissome body shook. “Oh, Mr. Bransford!” she sobbed between her fingers. “How could you—how could you say that?”
The clock chimed. A pealing voice beat out into the night: “Masks off!” A hundred voices swelled the cry; it was drowned in waves of laughter. It rose again tumultuously: “Masks off! Masks off!” Nearer came hateful voices, too, that cried: “Ellinor! Ellinor! Where are you?”
“I must go!” said Jeff. “They’ll be looking for you. No; you didn’t do any of those things. You couldn’t do any of those things. Good-by!”
“Ellinor! Ellinor Hoffman!! Where are you?”
Miss Hoffman whipped off her mask. From the open window a shaft of light fell on her face. It was flushed, sparkling, radiant. “Masks off!” she said. “Stupid!... Oh, you great goose! Of course I did!” She stepped back into the shadow.
No one, as the copybook says justly, may be always wise. Conversely, the most unwise of us blunders sometimes upon the right thing to do. With a glimmer of returning intelligence Mr. Bransford laid his noseguard on the window-sill.
“Sir!” said Ellinor then. “How dare you?” Then she turned the other cheek. “Good-by!” she whispered, and fled away to the ballroom.
Mr. Bransford, in the shadows, scratched his head dubiously.
“Her Christian name was Ellinor,” he muttered. “Ellinor! H’m—Ellinor! Very appropriate name.... Very!... And I don’t know yet where she lives!”
He wandered disconsolately away to the garden wall, forgetting the discarded noseguard.