In five minutes he reappeared to announce, in a tone of disappointment, that he could find Daniel nowhere. He could see a light through his keyhole, but the door was locked, and he could get no admittance. Just then Lu came up to present a certain—no, an uncertain—young man of the fleet stranded on parlor furniture earlier in the evening. To Lu's great astonishment Miss Pilgrim asked Billy's permission to leave. It was granted with all the courtesy of a preux chevalier, on the condition readily assented to by the lady that she should dance one lancers with him during the evening.
"Dear me!" exclaimed Lu, after Billy had gone back like a superior being to assist at the childish amusement of his contemporaries, "would anybody ever suppose that was our Billy?"
"I should, my dear sister," said I, with proud satisfaction; "but you remember I always was just to Billy."
Left free, I went myself to hunt up Daniel, I found his door locked and a light shining through the keyhole, as Billy had stated. I made no attempt to enter by knocking, but, going to my room and opening the window next his, leaned out as far as I could, shoved up his sash with my cane, and pushed aside his curtain. Such an unusual method of communication could not fail to bring him to the window with a rush. When he saw me he trembled like a guilty thing, his countenance fell, and, no longer able to feign absence, he unlocked his door and let me enter by the normal mode.
"Why, Daniel Lovegrove, my nephew, what does this mean? Are you sick?" "Uncle Edward, I am not sick—and this means that I am a fool. Even a little boy like Billy puts me to shame. I feel humbled to the very dust. I wish I'd been a missionary and got massacred by savages. Oh, that I'd been permitted to wear damp stockings in childhood, or that my mother hadn't carried me through the measles! If it weren't wrong to take my life into my own hands, I'd open that window, and— and—sit in a draft this very evening! Oh, yes! I'm just that bitter! Oh, oh, oh!"
And he paced the floor with strides of frenzy.
"Well, my dear fellow, let's look at the matter calmly a minute. What brought on this sudden attack? You seemed doing well enough the first ten minutes after we came down. I was only out of your sight long enough to speak to the Rumbullion party, who had just come in, and when I turned around you were gone. Now you are in this fearful condition. What is there in the Rumbullions to start you off on such a bender of bashfulness as this which I here behold?"
"Rumbullion indeed!" said Daniel. "A hundred Rumbullions could not make me feel as I do. But she can shake me into a whirlwind with her little finger; and she came with the Rumbullions!"
"What! D'you—Miss Pilgrim?"
"Miss Pilgrim!"