self and yawning as if he were just out of bed.

'Jerrie, you here? Did you stay all night? If I'd known that, I'd have
made an effort to come down to breakfast, though I think getting up in
the morning a bore. Why, what's the matter? You look as if you were
going to faint. Sit down here,' he continued, as he saw Jerrie reel
forward as if she were about to fall.

He put her into the chair and stood over her, fanning her with his hat
and wondering what he should do, while for a moment she lost
consciousness of the things about her, and her mind went floating off
after the picture on the wall in Wiesbaden, which was haunting her that
morning.

When she came to herself, Tom and Dick and Billy were all three hovering
around, and so close to her that without opening her eyes she could have
told exactly where each one was standing, Tom by the smell of tobacco,
with which his clothes were saturated, Billy by the powerful scent of
white rose with which he always perfumed his handkerchief, and Dick,
because, as she had once said to Nina when a child, he was so clean and
looked as if he had just been scrubbed. The two young men had come to
enquire for Maude, and had found Jerrie half swooning under the tree,
with Tom fanning her frantically and acting like a wild man.

Jerrie had seen Dick twice since her refusal of him, and both times her
manner, exactly like what it had always been to him, had put him at his
ease, so that a looker-on would never have dreamed of that episode under
the pines when she nearly broke his heart. Billy, however, was more
conscious. He had not seen Jerrie since he took her home in his
dog-cart, and his face was scarlet and his manner nervous and
constrained as he stood before her, longing and yet not daring to fan
her with his hat just as Tom was doing.

Of the three young men who had sought her hand, Billy's wound was the
deepest, and Billy would remember it the longest; for, mingled with his
defeat, was a sense of mortification and hatred of his own personal
appearance, which he could not help thinking had influenced Jerrie's
decision. 'And I don't blame her, by Jove!' he said to himself a
hundred times. 'She could not marry a pigmy, and I was a fool to hope
it; but I shall love her just the same as long as I live, and if I can
ever help her I will.'

And when at last Jerrie was better, and assured him so with her own
sweet graciousness of manner, and put her hand upon his shoulder to
steady he