Page:Roads of Destiny (1909).djvu/267

 Mr. McGill. Well, I’m not going to scold you any more, Mr. Tansey, if it is a little late—Oh! I turned it the wrong way!”

Miss Katie gave a little scream. Absent-mindedly she had turned the blaze of the lamp entirely out instead of higher. It was very dark.

Tansey heard a musical, soft giggle, and breathed an entrancing odour of heliotrope. A groping light hand touched his arm.

“How awkward I was! Can you find your way—Sam?”

“I—I think I have a match, Miss K-Katie.”

A scratching sound; a flame; a glow of light held at arm’s length by the recreant follower of Destiny illuminating a tableau which shall end the ignominious chronicle—a maid with unkissed, curling, contemptuous lips slowly lifting the lamp chimney and allowing the wick to ignite; then waving a scornful and abjuring hand toward the staircase—the unhappy Tansey, erstwhile champion in the prophetic lists of fortune, ingloriously ascending to his just and certain doom, while (let us imagine) half within the wings stands the imminent figure of Fate jerking wildly at the wrong strings, and mixing things up in her usual able manner.