The Dim Lantern. Temple Bailey
in this warmth and fragrance he expanded. “What a charming room,” he said, and smiled at her.
Her first view of him confirmed the opinion she formed from his picture. He was apparently not over forty, a stocky, well-built, ruddy man, with fair hair that waved crisply, and with clear blue eyes, lighter, she learned afterward, than Edith’s, but with just a hint of that burning blue. He had the air of indefinable finish which speaks of a life spent in the right school and the right college, and the 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, and Towne had replied promptly, “Certainly not. There’s nothing we have to say that you can’t hear.”
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 Delafield Simms? A woman’s hurt pride isn’t to be healed by the thought of a man’s dead body.
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.”
“She probably forgot to take it off; her mind wasn’t on rings.” Jane’s voice was warm with feeling.
He looked at her with some curiosity. “What was it on?”
“Oh, her heart was broken. Nothing else mattered. Can’t you see?”
He hesitated for a moment before he spoke. “I don’t believe it was broken. I hardly think she loved him.”
Baldy blazed, “But why should she marry him?”
“Oh, well, it was a good match. A very good match. And Edith’s not in the least emotional——”
“Really?” said Jane pleasantly.
Baldy was silent. Was Frederick Towne blind to the wonders that lay behind those eyes of burning blue?
Jane swept them back to the matter of the bag. “We thought you ought to have it, Mr. Towne, but Baldy had scruples about revealing anything he knows about Miss Towne’s hiding-place. He feels that she trusted him.”
“You said you had advertised, Mr. Barnes?”
“Yes.”
“Well, the one thing is to get her home. Tell her that if she calls you up.” Frederick looked suddenly tired and old.
Baldy, leaning against the mantel, gazed down at him. “It’s hard to decide what I ought to do. But I feel that I’m right in giving her a chance first to answer the advertisement.”
Towne’s tone showed a touch of irritation. “Of course you’ll have to act as you think best.”
And now Jane took things in her own hands. “Mr. Towne, I’m going to make you a cup of coffee.”
“I shall be very grateful,” he smiled at her. What a charming child she was! He was soothed and refreshed by the atmosphere they created. This boy and girl were a friendly pair and he loved his ease. His own house, since Edith’s departure, had been funereal, and his friends had been divided in their championship between himself and Edith. But the young Barneses were so pleasantly responsive with their lighted-up eyes and their little air of making him one with them. Edith had always seemed to put him quite definitely on the shelf. With little Jane and her brother he had a feeling of equality of age.
“Look here,” he spoke impulsively, “may I tell you all about it? It would relieve my mind immensely.”
To Jane it was a thrilling moment. Having poured the coffee, she came out from behind her battlement of silver and sat in her chintz chair. She did not knit; she was enchanted by the tale that Towne was telling. She sat very still, her hands folded, the tropical birds about her. To Frederick she seemed like a bird herself—slim and lovely, and with a voice that sang!
Towne was not an impressionable man. His years of bachelorhood had hardened him to feminine arts. But here was no artfulness. Jane assumed nothing. She was herself. As he talked to her, he became aware of some stirred emotion. An almost youthful eagerness to shine as the hero of his tale. If he embroidered the theme, it was for her benefit. What he told was as he saw it. But what he told was not the truth, nor even half of it.
CHAPTER IV
BEAUTY WAITS
Edith Towne had lived with her Uncle Frederick nearly four years when she became engaged to Delafield Simms. Her mother was dead, as was her father. Frederick was her father’s only brother, and had a big house to himself, after his mother’s death. It seemed the only haven for his niece, so he asked her, and asked also his father’s cousin, Annabel Towne, to keep house for him, and chaperone Edith.
Annabel was over sixty, and rather indefinite, but she served to play propriety, and there was nothing else demanded of her in Frederick’s household of six servants. She was a dried-up and desiccated person, with fixed ideas of what one owed to society. Frederick’s mother had been like that, so he did not mind. He rather liked to think that the woman of his family kept to old ideals. It gave to things an air of dignity.
Edith, when she came, was different. So different that Frederick was glad that she had three more years at college before she would spend the winters with him. The summers were not hard to arrange. Edith and Annabel adjourned to the Towne cottage on an island in Maine—and Frederick went up for week-ends and for the month of August. Edith spent much time out-of-doors with her young friends. She was rather fond of her Uncle Fred, but he did not loom large on the horizon of her youthful occupations.
Then came her winter at home, and her consequent engagement to Delafield Simms. It was because of Uncle Fred that she became engaged. She simply didn’t want to live with him any more. She felt that Uncle Fred would be glad to have her go, and the feeling was mutual. She was an elephant on his hands. Naturally. He was a great old dear, but he was a Turk. He didn’t know it, of course. But his ideas of being master of his own house were perfectly archaic. Cousin Annabel and the servants, and everybody in his office simply hung on his words, and Edith wouldn’t hang. She came into his bachelor Paradise like a rather troublesome Eve, and demanded her share of the universe. He didn’t like it, and there you were.
It