said his wife,
reprovingly. "Edward R. Hunter, I wonder at you! Were you never young
yourself?"

"Oh, but we do!" Jane was capably opening the front door of the little
car. "We're late! I kept Marty waiting! I'm going to ride with the
chauffeur, and Marty can sit with the girls. When Mrs. Wetherby says
'eight o'clock' she means it, not quarter past." She was chatty and
intensely friendly with them all during the brief drive. She even
produced the proper degree of articulate mirth for the young father's
painstaking jest about his son's nickname being Teddy b-a-r-e, bear, most
of the time.

When they stopped before the Wetherby house Martin was out of the
automobile with heavy swiftness and lifted Jane bodily to the sidewalk
and hurried her up the walk. "All right for you, girlie," he chuckled,
"all right for you! But you just wait! Wait till going home to-night!"

Jane drew Sarah Farraday aside when they were in Mrs. Wetherby's phrase,
"taking off their things in the north chamber,"--a solid and
dependable-looking room. "Sally, I want you to come home with me and stay
over night."

"Oh, Jane, I don't believe I could,--not to-night! If I'd known sooner--I
haven't anything with me."

"I'll loan you everything you need. Please, Sally! You can telephone your
mother now."

"But Edward and Nannie brought me, and it seems sort of----"

"Sally, don't be a nuisance! I want you. I--_need_ you!"

Sarah Farraday peered closely at her through her nearsighted eyes. "Jane!
You haven't quarreled with Marty, have you? Oh, Jane!"

"No, but I shall if you don't come home with me!"

Her best friend looked long and anxiously at her and then went with a
sigh to telephone her mother, and the evening, which Mrs. Wetherby
described as "a little gathering of the young folks," got under way. Jane
played cards sedately for the earlier part of it and joined with
conscientious liveliness in the games which came later, just before Mrs.
Wetherby's conception of "light refreshments" was served,--pineapple and
banana salad with whipped cream and maraschino cherries on it, three
kinds of exceptionally sweet and sticky cake, thick chocolate with melted
marshmallows floating on its surface, and large quantities of home-made
fudge in crystal bonbon dishes.

To Martin Wetherby, watching her contentedly out of his small, bright
eyes, Jane Vail was what he and his mother termed the life of the party,
but although she played an unfaltering part in