Mrs. McFee, emerging from the supper-room where all was in readiness,
caught one flash of the blazing, questing eyes through the silken mask-
slits, and received a start. She tried to recollect where she had seen
the like, and a vivid picture was recalled of a certain proud and
rebellious sinner whom she had once encountered on a fruitless errand for
the Lord.
So it was that the good woman took the trail in hot and righteous wrath,
a trail which brought her ultimately into the company of Mrs. Eppingwell
and Floyd Vanderlip. Mrs. Eppingwell had just found the opportunity to
talk with the man. She had determined, now that Flossie was so near at
hand, to proceed directly to the point, and an incisive little ethical
discourse was titillating on the end of her tongue, when the couple
became three. She noted, and pleasurably, the faintly foreign accent of
the "Beg pardon" with which the furred woman prefaced her immediate
appropriation of Floyd Vanderlip; and she courteously bowed her
permission for them to draw a little apart.
Then it was that Mrs. McFee's righteous hand descended, and accompanying
it in its descent was a black mask torn from a startled woman.
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