ice round Central Park before his feet gave out
and he allowed himself to be taken back to his apartment in a taxi.
Jill had been very kind and very sweet and very regretful, but it was
only too manifest that on the question of becoming Mrs. Otis
Pilkington her mind was made up. She was willing to like him, to be a
sister to him, to watch his future progress with considerable
interest, but she would not marry him.

One feels sorry for Otis Pilkington in his hour of travail. This was
the fifth or sixth time that this sort of thing had happened to him,
and he was getting tired of it. If he could have looked into the
future--five years almost to a day from that evening--and seen himself
walking blushfully down the aisle of St. Thomas' with Roland Trevis'
sister Angela on his arm, his gloom might have been lightened. More
probably, however, it would have been increased. At the moment, Roland
Trevis' sister Angela was fifteen, frivolous, and freckled and, except
that he rather disliked her and suspected her--correctly--of laughing
at him, amounted to just _nil_ in Mr. Pilkington's life. The idea of
linking his lot with hers would have appalled him, enthusiastically
though he was in favour of it five years later.

However, Mr. Pilkington was unable to look into the future, so his
reflections on this night of sorrow were not diverted from Jill. He
thought sadly of Jill till two-thirty, when he fell asleep in his
chair and dreamed of her. At seven o'clock his Japanese valet, who had
been given the night off, returned home, found him, and gave him
breakfast. After which, Mr. Pilkington went to bed, played three games
of solitaire, and slept till dinner-time, when he awoke to take up the
burden of life again. He still brooded on the tragedy which had
shattered him. Indeed, it was only two weeks later, when at a dance he
was introduced to a red-haired girl from Detroit, that he really got
over it.

* * * * *

The news was conveyed to Freddie Rooke by Uncle Chris. Uncle Chris,
with something of the emotions of a condemned man on the scaffold
waiting for a reprieve, had watched Jill and Mr. Pilkington go off
together into the dim solitude at the back of the orchestra chairs,
and, after an all too brief interval, had observed the latter whizzing
back, his every little movement having a meaning of its own--and that
meaning one which convinced Uncle Chris that Freddie, in estimating
Mr. Pilkington as