For some days I was so much occupied with Clyde\'s affairs, and other business matters which demanded my professional attention, that I saw little of any of my friends in a social way, but toward the end of the week Mr. Whyte asked me over the telephone to come up to dinner. I was only too glad to go, but I confess that when I saw Jean was not expected, I was so disappointed that I began wondering how I could cut the evening short enough to give me a chance to run in at the next door.

"I asked Jean to come over," said Mrs. Whyte, unconsciously answering my unspoken question, "but the dear child had something else on for this evening."

Mr. Whyte chuckled without disguise. "Jean has a beau," he said, with an air.

"And if she has, Carroll," Mrs. Whyte took him up, with instant sex-championship, "it is nothing to make remarks about. Jean is quite old enough to receive attention, and he is an unexceptionable young man. I don\'t think it is delicate of you to make comments."

"Who is making the comments?" he demanded good-humoredly.

"Well, you implied comments, and I don\'t want you to do it when Jean is around. When a girl has no mother and is, besides, as wilful as Jean is,--and she is wilful, Katherine, although I admit she is charming about it, and I should be in love with her myself if I were a man,--the sooner such a girl is married to a steady young man, the better."

"Is the steady young man Mr. Garney?" I asked. The annoyance with which I had observed his prostration before Jean probably betrayed itself in my voice, for Miss Thurston looked up to answer reassuringly.

"Oh, it is not a serious matter. Mr. Garney was a friend of Eugene\'s, and Jean, bless her heart, would listen to a jointed doll if it could say \'Gene.\' Besides, it was Mr. Ellison who asked him to come over this evening. He seems to have quite taken Mr. Garney up,--has him over frequently."

"By the way, Clara," said Mr. Whyte, "I asked Ellison for that contribution to your Day Nursery. You would have done better to ask him yourself. He turned me down hard,--said he had just had to make a thousand dollar payment unexpectedly and was hard up."

The talk shifted, but I confess it had made me uncomfortable. I had had nothing against Garney until I saw him bowled over by Jean, and then I immediately took a violent dislike to him. Yet she probably regarded his devotion merely as pleasantly flattering.

I was uncommonly glad, therefore, to find Jean waiting for me in my office the next afternoon. Fellows was away, and she was sitting at my desk in a stillness that was more than patient. It was tense. An odd-shaped package was clasped in her hands.

"Well, little Story-Book Girl, are you waiting for the prince?" I hailed her. There was something in her sweet absurdities that always made me feel as though we were playing a game.

"I was waiting for you," she said sedately.

"Lucky me! And poor disappointed prince! I can see him, in a green velvet suit, with a long, dejected feather in his drooping cap, waiting around the corner of your imagination for you to give a glance in his direction. That\'s all that would be necessary to bring him to life. Instead of that, you are wasting your thoughts--wasting them according to his notion, of course, not mine!--on a chap who is already alive!"

She smiled perforce at my foolery, but her smile was a trifle tremulous. I felt a trouble back of it, that must be treated respectfully.

"Is there anything the matter, Miss Jean?" I asked.

"There\'s Gene!" she said, a little reproachfully. Her eyes searched mine.

"Oh, I know! Of course! But there isn\'t anything new?"

She hesitated the barest moment. "That\'s enough," she breathed.

"But that is coming out all right!" I said reassuringly.

She turned her questioning eyes upon me again, and her look went deeper than ever before. It suddenly struck me that I was foolish to insist upon regarding and treating her as a child. Her eyes were unfathomable, but the mystery that veiled them belonged to womanhood, rather than to childhood.

"Do you say that just to keep me from fretting," she asked gravely, "or do you really know anything that is going to save Gene? Really and truly clear him and--and give him back to me?"

The seriousness and maturity of her manner had so impressed me--I was on the point of saying "had so imposed on me," and I don\'t know but what that would be the right word--that I took the hazard of answering her with the bare and simple truth.

"No, I don\'t know anything that is going to clear your brother. But I have a confidence which I feel sure is going to mean a victory. I can\'t say anything more. But it is a long time yet to the trial."

She seemed to shiver a little at the word, and withdrew her eyes. I waited for a moment, thinking that if she had any special anxiety on her mind she would of necessity betray it if left to herself, but when she spoke it was on a totally different matter.

"You are going away?" It was a statement rather than a question.

"What makes you think that?" I parried. I had indeed a very definite intention of going away, but I hadn\'t mentioned it to anyone, and I didn\'t care to have my plans known.

"Why, I thought you would probably go to hunt up Mr. Clyde. When you find him, I wish you would give him this." And she handed me an old letter in a faded envelope.

"But you are quite likely to see Mr. Clyde as soon as I do," I protested.

"I\'d rather you had it," she said vaguely. "There is no hurry. Sometime he would like to have it. It is an old letter that my father wrote to my mother many years ago. He mentions Mr. Clyde in it, and says nice things about him, so I thought he might like to keep it."

"I am sure he would," I said warmly. "You are a dear little girl to think of it. And if you really want me to take charge of it, I will. I shall probably see Mr. Clyde sometime, or at least hear from him. But I shall be jealous of Mr. Clyde pretty soon. Here you give me an interesting letter, to be handed on to Mr. Clyde. And Miss Thurston gives me a lovely thick letter--but not for me at all, only for me to hand to Mr. Clyde. Happy Mr. Clyde!"

She listened with an uncertain smile and wistful eyes, as though she were holding back some brooding thought. There was something odd in her manner that half worried me.

"I have something for you, too," she said after a moment. "I have been looking through an old trunk of keepsakes that I keep at Uncle Howard\'s,--things that be............