right clubs, of a background of generations of good blood and good breeding. He wore evening clothes, and one knew somehow that dinner never found him without them.

Yet in spite of these evidences of pomp and circumstance, Jane felt perfectly at ease with him. He was, after all, she reflected, only a gentleman, and Baldy was that. The only difference lay in their divergent incomes. So, as the two men talked, she knitted on, with the outward effect of placidity.

“Do you want me to go?” she had asked them,[40] and Towne had replied promptly, “Certainly not. There’s nothing we have to say that you can’t hear.”

[40]

So Jane listened with all her ears, and modified the opinion she had formed of Frederick Towne from his picture and from her first glimpse of him. He was nice to talk to, but he might be hard to live with. He had obstinacy and egotism.

“Why Edith should have done it amazes me.”

Jane, naughtily remembering the Admiral’s song from Pinafore which had been her father’s favorite, found it beating in her head—My amazement, my surprise, you may learn from the expression of my eyes——

But no hint of this showed in her manner.

“She was hurt,” she said, “and she wanted to hide.”

“But people seem to think that in some way it is my fault. I don’t like that. It isn’t fair. We’ve always been the best of friends—more like brother and sister than niece and uncle.”

“But not like Baldy and me,” said Jane to herself, “not in the least like Baldy and me.”

“Of course Simms ought to be shot,” Towne told them heatedly.

“He ought to be hanged,” was Baldy’s amendment.

Jane’s needles clicked, but she said nothing. She was dying to tell these bloodthirsty males what she thought of them. What good would it do to shoot[41] Delafield Simms? A woman’s hurt pride isn’t to be healed by the thought of a man’s dead body.

[41]

Young Baldwin brought out the bag. “It is one that Delafield gave her,” Frederick stated, “and I cashed a check for her at the bank the day before the wedding. I can’t imagine why she took the ring with her.”

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