He walked rapidly, a fine, easy figure, swinging his stick in a way that suggested exhilaration.
Alice, staring after him through the irregular apertures of a lace curtain, showed no similar buoyancy.

Upon the instant she closed the door all sparkle left her: she had become at once the simple and sometimes troubled girl her family knew.
"What is going on out there ?" her mother asked, approaching from the dining-room.
"Oh, nothing," Alice said, indifferently, as she turned away.

"That Mr.
Russell met me downtown and walked up with me." "Mr.Russell?
Oh, the one that's engaged to Mildred ?" "Well--I don't know for certain.

He didn't seem so much like an engaged man to me." And she added, in the tone of thoughtful preoccupation: "Anyhow--not so terribly!" Then she ran upstairs, gave her father his tobacco, filled his pipe for him, and petted him as he lighted it..