closely in
touch with each other. I have had very little opportunity to talk with
him, but I have felt his sympathy in several interested glances we
have exchanged with each other. I am looking forward to the
establishment of a perfect friendship with him."

I told myself that I was mistaken in thinking that the expression in
Jane's eyes was softened to the verge of dreaminess and my inmost soul
shouted at the idea of Jane and Polk and their day alone in the woods.

Since that night that Polk humiliated me as completely as a man can
humiliate a woman, he has looked at me like a whipped child, and I
haven't looked at him at all I have used Jane as a wide-spread fan
behind which to hide from him. How was I to know what was going on on
the other side of the fan?

It is a relief to realize that in the world there are at least a few
women like Jane that don't have to be protected from Polk and his kind.
Jane is one of the hunted that has turned and has come back to meet the
pursuer with outstretched and disarming hand. This, I suspect, is to be
about her first real tussle; skoal to the victor!

"I advised your Aunt Augusta to ask you to talk again to your Uncle
Peter, and Nell is to seek an interview with Mr. Hardin at her earliest
opportunity, though I think the only result will be instruction and
uplift for Nell, as a more illumined thing I never had said to me on the
subject of the relation of men and women than the one he uttered to me
last night, as he said good-by to me out on the porch in that glorious
moonlight that seems brighter here in Glendale than I have ever seen it
out in the world anywhere else."

"What did he say?" I asked perfectly naturally, though a double-bladed
pain was twisted around in my solar plexus as the vision of Jane's last
night interview in the moonlight with the Crag, and Nell's
soon-to-be-one, hit me broadside at the same time. I haven't had one by
myself with him for a week.

"Why, of course, women are the breath that men draw into their lungs of
life to supply eternal combustion," was what he said when I asked him
point-blank what he thought of the League. "Only let us breathe slowly
as we ascend to still greater elevations with their consequent rarefied
air," he added, with the most heavenly thoughtfulness in his fine face.
"Did it ever occur to you, Evelina, that your Cousin James is really a
radiantly beautiful man? How could you be so mistaken, as to both him
and his personal a