e things she had anticipated had happened. Jack had treated her as
he would any other young woman of his acquaintance--always with
courtesy--always doing everything to oblige her, but never yielding to
her sway. He would laugh sometimes at her pretensions, just as he would
have laughed at similar self-assertiveness on the part of any one else
with whom he must necessarily be thrown, but never by thought, word
or deed had he ever given my Lady Wren the faintest suspicion that he
considered her more beautiful, better dressed, or more entertaining,
either in song, chirp, flight or plumage, than the flock of other birds
about her. Indeed, the Scribe knows it to be a fact that if Jack's
innate politeness had not forbidden, he would many times have told her
truths, some of them mighty unpleasant ones, to which her ears had been
strangers since her school-girl days.

This unstudied treatment, strange to say--the result really, of the
boy's indifference--had of late absorbed her. What she could not have
she generally longed for, and there was not the slightest question up to
the present moment that Jack was still afield.

Again the girl pressed the button of the cord within reach of her hand,
and for the third time Hortense entered.

"Have you told Parkins I want to know the very instant Mr. John comes
in?"

"Yes, miss."

"And, Hortense, did you understand that Mr. John was to go out to meet
the gentleman, or was the gentleman to come to his rooms?"

"To his rooms, I think, miss."

She was wearing her blue tea-gown, stretched out on the cushions
of one of the big divans in the silent drawing-room, when she heard
Jack's night-key touch the lock. Springing to her feet she ran toward
him.

"Why, Jack, what's this I hear about your not coming to my dance? It
isn't true, is it?" She was close to him now, her little head cocked on
one side, her thin, silken draperies dripping about her slender figure.

"Who told you?"

"Parkins told Hortense."

"Leaky Parkins?" laughed Jack, tossing his hat on the hall table.

"But you are coming, aren't you, Jack? Please do!"

"Not to-night; you don't need me, Corinne." His voice told her at once
that not only was the leash gone but that the collar was off as well.

"Yes, but I do."

"Then please excuse me, for I have an old gentleman coming to pay me
a visit. The finest old gentleman, by the way, you ever saw! A regular
thoroughbred, Corinne--who looks like a magnificent portrai