arried.
Didn't you know that?" and he unbuckled the shirt portfolio as he spoke
just as if calamities and tragedies and shooting stars might not follow on
the heels of such a simple statement as that last.

It was an awful moment, but poor Jack did manage to continue looking out
of the window. If any greater demand had been made upon him he might have
sunk beneath the double weight.

"No," he said at last, his voice painfully steady; "I didn't know it."

Burnett laughed heartlessly, hauling forth his apparel with a refined
cruelty which took careful heed of possible interfolded shoes or cravats.

"She married an Englishman when she was nineteen years old," he said.
"That was when they sent me to Eton that little while,--until I drove the
horse through the drug shop. The time I told you about, don't you know?"

"Yes, I remember," said Jack. He observed with sickening distinctness that
the night had begun to fall, the river's silver ribbon had become a black
snake, and that the mountain range beyond loomed chill and dark and
cheerless. "I guess I ought to be getting into my things," he said, moving
toward his own door.

"There's a bath in here," his friend called after him. "We're to divide
it."

"Sure," was the reply. It sounded a trifle thick.

"I don't think that she ought to," said the brother to himself, as he
began to draw out his stick-pin before the mirror, "I don't care if she is
my favorite sister--I don't think that she ought to."

Then he went on to make ready for the securing of his half of the bath,
and forthwith forgot his sister and his friend.

CHAPTER FOUR - MARRIED

It was almost like a scene at a ball, the great white-and-gold music room
before dinner that night. The Burnett family proper numbered fifteen among
themselves, and there were nearly thirty guests added. It was entirely too
large a house party to have handled successfully for very long, but it
would be most awfully jolly for three or four days; and now, when the
whole crowd were gathered waiting for dinner, the picture was one of such
bubbling joy that Jack's very heavy heart seemed to himself to be terribly
out of place there and he wondered whether he should be able to put up
even a fairly presentable front during the endless hours that must ensue
before the time for breaking up arrived.

Burnett took him all around and introduced him to people in general, and
people in general seemed to him to merely bring the fact