rate."

"You'd better be."

Jack laughed. The laugh sounded a trifle hollow, but still it was a laugh,
and that in itself was a triumph of which none but himself might ever
measure the extent.

Because in that moment he decided to lay the whole case before her the
next time that he went to town, and the coming to a resolution was a
relief from the uncertainty that clouded his days and nights--even if a
further black curtain of darkest doubt hung before the possibilities of
what her answer might be.

CHAPTER NINE - THE DOWNFALL OF HOPE

It was on a Saturday about the middle of May that Jack came to town, his
mind well braced with love and arguments, and his main thoughts being that
when he returned something would be settled.

It was a beautiful day, warm and sunny, and at five in the afternoon both
of the drawing-room windows of Mrs. Rosscott's house were wide open, and
the lace curtains were taking the breeze like little sails.

Just as Jack mounted the steps, the door opened, and a plainly dressed,
unattractive-looking man was let out. The servant who did the letting out
saw Jack and let him in without closing the door between the egress of the
one and the ingress of the other. So he entered without ringing, and, as
he was very well known and intensely popular with all of Mrs. Rosscott's
servants, the man invited him to walk up unannounced, since he himself was
just "bringing in the tea."

Jack went upstairs, and because the carpet was of thickly piled velvet and
his boots were the boots of a well-shod gentleman, he made no noise
whatever in the so doing.

There were double parlors above stairs in the domicile which Burnett's
sister had taken until July, and they were furnished in the most correct
and trying mode of Louis XIV. The chairs were gilt and very uncomfortable.
The ornaments were all straight up and down and made in such shapes that
there was no place to flick off cigarette ashes anywhere. Nothing could be
pulled up to anything else and there was not a single good place to rest
one's elbows anywhere. The only saving grace in the situation was that
after five minutes or so Mrs. Rosscott invariably suggested removal to the
library which lay beyond--a very different species of apartment where no
mode at all prevailed except the terrible _demode_ thing known as comfort.
To prevent her visitors, when seated (for the five minutes aforementioned)
amid the correct carving of French art, from loo