f his effort to keep a
straight face.

"Tomorrow?" he asked in low tones.

"At eight o'clock."

Jim bowed awkwardly to Jane, muttered something inarticulate and rushed
to his car.

The two girls walked in silence through Twenty-eighth Street to Broadway
and thence across the Square.

Seated in her room, Mary could contain her pent-up rage no longer.

"Jane Anderson, I'm furious with you! How could you be so rude--so
positively insulting!"

"Insulting?"

"Yes. You stared at him in cold disdain as if he were a toad under your
feet!"

"I assure you, dear----"

"Why did you do it?"

The artist rose, walked to the window, looked out on the Square for a
moment, extended her hand and laid it gently on Mary's shoulder.

"You've made up your mind to marry this man, honey?"

"I certainly have," was the emphatic answer.

Jane paused.

"And all in seven days?"

"Seven days or seven years--what does it matter? He's my mate--we
love--it's Fate."

"It's incredible!"

"What's incredible?"

"Such madness."

"Perhaps love is madness--the madness that makes life worth the candle.
I've never lived before the past week."

"And you, the dainty, cultured, pious little saint, will marry
this--this----"

"Say it! I want you to be frank----"

"Perfectly frank?"

"Absolutely."

"This coarse, ugly, illiterate brute----"

"Jane Anderson, how dare you!" Mary sprang to her feet, livid with rage.

"I asked if I might be frank. Shall I lie to you? Or shall I tell you
what I think?"

"Say what you please; it doesn't matter," Mary interrupted angrily.

"I only speak at all because I love you. Your common-sense should tell
you that I speak with reluctance. But now that I have spoken, let me
beg of you for your father's sake, for your dead mother's sake, for my
sake--I'm your one disinterested friend and you know that my love is
real--for the sake of your own soul's salvation in this world and the
next--don't marry that brute! Commit suicide if you will--jump off the
bridge--take poison, cut your throat, blow your brains out--but, oh dear
God, not this!"

"And why, may I ask?" was the cold question.

"He's in no way your equal in culture, in character, in any of the
essentials on which the companionship of marriage must be based----"

"He's a diamond in the rough," Mary staunchly asserted.

"He's in the rough, all right! The only diamond about him is the one in
his red scarf--`Take it from me, Kiddo! Take it