y did not interest her enough to make her talk," Jane said,
quick to the rescue.

"What would she be interested _with_, Jane?"

"Bobs, what will you take to let this subject drop?" said Jerry.

"What do you offer?"

"How about the study I am working on now?"

"Must see it first."

"You shall, in the morning."

"I'm free to-night, then?"

"As you are strong, be merciful."

"You don't deserve it!"

But she did drop the subject. She asked Jane about Christiansen, and if
he was coming to see them.

"I haven't asked him yet."

"Wish you would have him while I'm here. I'm crazy about him."

"Ask him, Jane," said the chastened Jerry.

"I will," she said.

It was characteristic of both of them, that she sent a wire to him next
day, asking him to come, and he arrived on an evening train.

"Have you ever had so prompt a guest?" he laughed, as he and Jerry came
out of the woods, toward the house. He took both her hands, with cordial
friendliness.

"It was such luck that my wire found you," she beamed on him.

"I tried to put him in the hack, Jane, but he would walk," said Jerry.

"Of course I would walk. What a charming place," he added.

"We love it," said Jane. "Ah, here's Bobs."

Bobs strode up the road, bare-headed, swinging a stick, like a boy.

"Well met, Atalanta," he called, going to meet her.

"Hurrah for you! Did you meet the invitation on the way out?"

"I started before I read it through," he laughed. "It's good to see you
looking so well."

"It's air, and Jane; mostly Jane. Long ago Jerry made an epigram about
her. He said: 'Jane can mend anything from a leak in a pipe to a broken
heart.'"

They all laughed and Jane turned to Jerry saying curiously:

"Did you say that?"

"I think, with you, that it is too good for me, Jane. But I am more
convinced of its truth every day."

"Why not? There must be healing presences, since there are disturbing
ones," Christiansen suggested.

Martin was in fine fettle, and from the moment of his arrival, he
surcharged the group with his vitality. Even Jerry was aroused by it,
and as for Jane, he looked at her and listened to her as if to a
stranger. Evidently she and Christiansen were on terms of easy
friendship and understanding. It gave him a queer sensation to think of
Jane taking a man of Christiansen's distinction as a matter of course.
More startling was the fact that Christiansen waited for Jane's opinion
as if it were the crux of the discus