All at once it grew silent just round the door, where it had been loudest,--and the silence spread itself like a stain, till it hushed everything but a few corner-duets.

A dark, sad-looking, middle-aged gentleman entered the parlor, with a young lady on his arm,--his daughter, as it seemed, for she was not wholly unlike him in feature, and of the same dark complexion.
"Dudley Venner," exclaimed a dozen people, in startled, but half-suppressed tones.
"What can have brought Dudley out to-night ?" said Jefferson Buck, a young fellow, who had been interrupted in one of the corner-duets which he was executing in concert with Miss Susy Pettingill.
"How do I know, Jeff ?" was Miss Susy's answer.

Then, after a pause,--"Elsie made him come, I guess.

Go ask Dr.Kittredge; he knows all about 'em both, they say." Dr.Kittredge, the leading physician of Rockland, was a shrewd old man, who looked pretty keenly into his patients through his spectacles, and pretty widely at men, women, and things in general over them.
Sixty-three years old,--just the year of the grand climacteric.

A bald crown, as every doctor should have.