Millicent Dixon had called on me unexpectedly, soaked from neck to ankle. I had been watching the vertical downpour from my window—long, heavy slate-pencils of water, that rebounded from the pavement in a mist a foot high,—and listening to the hurrying runnels that sluiced the gutters. It was full, uncompromising rain, and it thrashed steadily from the invisible cullender that had been a sky an hour ago. Millicent stood before me with her hand on the door, half vexed, but laughing out of her sodden garments.

“Now don’t sit there looking at me, Mr. Butterfield,” she exclaimed, as I admired at her plight with eyes half closed; “get me some things.”

I considered weightily.

“I have in the house at present,” I replied, “several morning suits, a Norfolk jacket, evening wear, pink silk——”

She tapped impatiently with her foot, shaking a sliver of little drops from the hem of her gown.

“Or perhaps fishing attire would be——?”

“Don’t be ponderous. Where’s Caroline?”

“Caroline, Miss Dixon, is out with Arthur, and will doubtless return in much the same state of rainwater as yourself.”

She disappeared towards Carrie’s quarters, her dress making a wet slap on the door as she whisked round. I rose to prepare brandy during her absence.

It should be mentioned that I was confined to my room with a slight attack of rheumatism, which my considerate friends persisted in regarding as gout. As a matter of fact the affection was purely muscular, and I indignantly repudiated the fuller flavour of the alleged complaint. My portliness must not be confounded with decadence.

Disconsolately enough, I had been fingering and sorting old letters, turning out drawer after drawer of forgotten trifles, and feeling none the younger in consequence. It was borne in upon me that I had a history, or some record of trivialities that passed as such; and these little drifted relics of the past had curiously discounted the glamour of what was going to happen to-morrow. Except for the unexpected shower, I should probably have been left to this melancholy occupation all day; and Millicent’s forced visit was very welcome.

She reappeared in garments of Caroline’s, passable in style, but with marked qualifications in the fit. She tops Caroline by three inches. I had often wondered idly where that three inches was accounted for, and how it was distributed. I knew now.

I surveyed her critically.

“Shoulders not bad,” I remarked, walking round her, while she stood at a laughing attention for kit inspection. “Waist—turn round—hm!—an inch and a half at most; all right so long as you don’t lean forward. Skirt—ah, the skirt—well, well, I’m past such things. Really, it’s not bad for an improvisation.”

“I couldn’t find Carrie’s slippers,” she said, putting forward a small foot.

The skirt had already revealed the silk-clad toes. I got her a particularly large pair of my own, brought her the brandy, which she drank like a sensible woman of twenty-eight, placed her an armchair near the fire, and resumed my own seat. Then I sought her eyes.

“It was most thoughtful of you, Miss Dixon, to remember an invalid, and to pay such a welcome call. I appreciate it. In the rain, too.”

Irony was wasted on this shameless woman. She looked at me boldly, and laughed.

“I assure you, Mr. Butterfield,” she replied, “the last thing I thought of when I left home was coming to see you. But oh, the rain! Look at it now.”

I was conscious of the fresh smell of wet pavement from where I sat—the window was open. The wheels of a hansom went past with a watery swish, the horse’s hoofs slapping clear in the deserted street, and the stones shone with a cleanness that they had not known for a month.

“At any rate,” I said magnanimously, “you’re here for an hour or two. It’s not going to stop yet. You may as well make a virtue of entertaining me.”

She bowed mockingly.

“It is I who am entertained,” she replied. “You have helped me in a watery dilemma. I am in your home. I wear your——”

I stopped her. They were not mine. They were Caroline’s.

“Slippers,” she continued, crossing them on the fender. “I think I’ll take Caroline’s place while she’s gadding about with Arthur.”

Again I stopped her. She was not in Caroline’s shoes.

“Besides, Miss Dixon,” I added, “are you not a little premature in offering to be a sister to me?”

“Never mind,” she replied, laughing; “call it housekeeper, if you like.”

“The imputation,” I answered, “is monstrous. I am a respectable bachelor, and never had such a thing. And if I had, she would have appeared before me in a fitting state—not a misfitting one.”

“Then we’d better make it sister after all,” she returned, “and my first duty is to demand what you were doing when I came in.”

I glanced at the half-sorted piles of notes, cards, ancient invitations, mementoes, and the hundred other matters which had doubtless been of more or less importance in their day, and shrugged my shoulders.

“I know,” said Miss Dixon, “it is rather dreadful. Seems like reading some one else’s letters. Let me help you.”

She put out her hand for the nearest packet. I placed my own firmly on hers.

“Miss Dixon,” I said slowly, “who are you that you would plunge thus recklessly into the tied-up part of a now reformed bachelor? That particular bundle is least of all fit for a sister’s perusal.”

“If Caroline neglected her duty,” she retorted, “that is no reason why I should do the same. I want to see them.”

“You had better take these instead,” I returned, pushing towards her a tray of wedding cards.

“I insist.”

“You insist?” I replied, in the tone of one speaking to a naughty child. “How old are you, Miss Dixon?”

She laughed.

“I think I am a good deal older than you, Rollo, in this respect; I don’t keep letters as I did when I was a sentimental schoolgirl. I destroy that kind.” And she nodded towards the bundle.

“Indeed?” I said. “And why did you not tell me sooner? That would have been valuable information to me at one time.”

“And why?”

“I might have written a good deal more than I did.”

“You never wrote anything unfitted for my sheltered youth,” she replied, quietly smiling, and burrowing one foot deeper into the cavernous recesses of a slipper.

“I don’t post all I write,” I corrected, “but I have written things that would have amazed a Bassishaw—and thought twice about it.”

“Bassishaw doesn’t say much in his letters,” she said musingly. She and Caroline were very good friends, and there had doubtless been a good deal of inter-feminine confidence between them.

“But why don’t you post them?”

“Oh,” I replied offhand, “they are experiments. It is another way of keeping a diary. Perhaps, after all, you may see them if you care to. They are merely studies in moods.”

I untied the packet.

“Here you are,” I continued. “Arthur Bassishaw, Esq., on the occasion of his engagement to Caroline. Good advice—but a little too late. It wouldn’t have been taken, anyway, from what I know of His Omnipotent Youthfulness. Never posted.”

“It might have been worth while to post it for the sake of reply,” Millicent returned smiling; “you’d have had something badly written, but very ardent.”

I shook my head.

“Bassishaw’s sword would be a good deal mightier than his pen,” I replied. “To see him in the throes of composition is a felicity I have hitherto missed. Now here’s another: to Caroline, on the same occasion. That, Millicent, cost me some trouble to write, and I am afraid it showed it—I have only one sister, you know. Unposted.”

“That was rather nice of you, Rollo,” she said.

“I should only have given myself away,” I returned. “Now this, to Mrs. Bassishaw, is one of two—the other one was posted. It was a hard alternative. I sent the usual nice thing; Mrs. Bassishaw would understand that. This”—I tapped the envelope—“would have appeared difficult to a widow still young, and still in the running with her own son.”

Millicent nodded. There were reasons for Mrs. Bassishaw’s conduct which her relatives approved and her friends condoned.

“These,” I continued, turning over two or three, “are small ebullitions that served their end in leaving me in a better temper; and in one at least of them I evaded a state of mind in which I was feeling very sorry for myself. It is a good game, don’t you think?”

“Excellent,” she returned, “from the point of view of your future biographer. I suppose you have one eye on the memoir-writer, Rollo. Is your statue to be equestrian?”

I waived reply magnanimously, and went on.

“Here is one to Mrs. Loring Chatterton; and not unconnected with it, one to yourself.”

“One to me?” she inquired, looking up. “Why to me? What mood did that exemplify?”

“I think, Millicent,” I replied, “that I must have felt rather a regard for you that evening.”

She bowed ironically.

“It is nice to be thought well of,” she replied, “even if the regard does stop at the posting point. It was a wet night, I suppose; or the servants had gone to bed?”

“The fires of the heart, Millicent,” I answered, in pompous periods, at which she only laughed, “are not quenched by rain. Yon gutters that run so musically could no more——”

“'Oh, Captain Shaw!’” she sang softly, “'type of true love kept under——’”

I leaned back, tapping the letter with the ends of my fingers, and signified my willingness to wait until her operatic fervour should have spent itself.

“It must have been ferverish,” she said, still laughing. “Did it take you long to write?”

“About eight years, Millicent,” I replied.

“And not to be posted after all? Never mind; I suppose I shall see it in the biography. I declare I’m almost curious, Rollo. Tell me, is it——?” She paused, and looked fairly and quietly at me, with an odd smile on her lips.

“It is,” I replied, returning her gaze. “Would you care to read it, Millicent?”

She rose and went to the window. A cold grey light that heralded the passing of the shower filled the room. The heavens were relenting, and already a corner of the leaden pall had lifted. Millicent would probably take the opportunity to leave.

“Would you care to read it?” I repeated, looking over my shoulder.

She faced round suddenly.

“No, Rollo,” she said, “I should not.”

“You are probably right,” I replied. “Proposal is a venerable formality; but the inevitable scene——”

She walked back from the window and stood before me, dignified in her heterogeneous attire and perfectly serious.

“I thought you knew better than that, Rollo,” she said. “I don’t think there would be any scene, and, anyway, I’m not in my first season, you know.” She smiled the same queer smile. “But if you think that I should be interested in such a matter merely as an—experiment in mood—you wrong me, Rollo; and if, on the other hand, I am to take it in the plainer sense, I should like something less warmed up and out of date. You can hardly call it fervid, can you?”

I admired Millicent in that moment. I rose and took her hand.

“Millicent,” I said, “I accept your rebuke. There is nothing further to be said—just now; but soon——”

She laughed her accustomed laugh, the same old Millicent again.

“I shall be perfectly willing to consider any representations you may have to make on the subject, Rollo, provided they are forwarded in the ordinary course. Will you ring for tea?”