riedly. The
brown eyes watched him slinking out before they allowed themselves a
second sight of the rose.

"Thank you so much," said Olive. "I feel as if you had killed a spider
for me, or an earwig. He was more like an earwig. He must have come in
here while I was asleep."

"A deported waiter going back to his native Naples, I imagine," Jean
said. "They ought not to have let you travel alone."

She smiled. "I am a law unto myself."

"That is a pity. Will you think me very impertinent if I confess that
I have been watching over you--at a respectful distance--ever since we
left Victoria? I do not approve of children wandering--"

She tilted her pretty chin at him. "Children! So you have made
yourself into a sort of G.F.S. for me?"

"You know," he said gravely, "we have a mutual friend." He drew a blue
and gold volume from an inner pocket.

Olive flushed scarlet, but she only said, "Oh, Keats!"

She looked at his hands as they turned the pages; they were clever and
kind, she thought, and she wondered if he was an artist or a doctor.
Those fingers might set a butterfly's wing, and yet they seemed very
strong. She did not know she had sighed until he said, "Am I boring
you?"

"Oh, no," she answered eagerly. "Please don't go yet unless you want
to. But tell me why you bought that book?"

"If you could have seen yourself as I saw you, you would understand,"
he answered. "I once saw a woman on my brother's estate pick up a
piece of gold on the road. She had never had so much money without
earning it in her life before, I suppose. At any rate she kissed it,
and her face was radiant. She was old and ugly and worn by her long
days of toil in the fields, and you-- Well, in spite of the
differences you reminded me of her, and I am curious to know which
poem of Keats brought that swift, rapt light of joy."

"It was 'White hawthorn and the pastoral eglantine'--"

Jean found the place and marked the passage before returning the book
to his pocket. "Now," he said, "you will come with me and have some
dinner."

CHAPTER III

Many women are shepherded through all life's journeyings by their
men--fathers, brothers, husbands--who look out their trains for them,
put them in the care of guards, and shield them from all contact with
sulky porters and extortionate cabmen. Olive, who had always to take
her own ticket and fight her own and her mother's battles, now tasted
the joys of irresponsibility with Avenel. He co