“But she must,” Jack had declared on his side. “My dearest, you can’t stay and play maid to Aunt Mary indefinitely, and you know that as well as I do.”
“Yes, I know that,” the whilom Janice then murmured. “It’s getting to be an awful question. They want me to come home for Thanksgiving. They think that I’ve been at the rest-cure long enough.”
Jack had laughed a bit just there, and then he suddenly ceased laughing and frowned a good deal instead.
“You were crying when I came,” he said. “The truth is you are working yourself to death and getting completely used up.”
“It is wearing, I must confess,” she answered. “Yesterday I played poker until I didn’t know a blue chip from a white one, and she won the whole pot with two little bits of pairs while I was drawing to a king. I begin to fear that my mind will give way. And yet, I really don’t see how to stop. She is so sick and tired of life here and she isn’t strong enough to go to town.”
“I know a very short way to put an end to everything,” said Jack. “I see two ways in fact,—one is to tell her the truth.”
“Oh, don’t do that,” cried his fiancée affrightedly. “The shock would kill her outright.”
“The other way,—” said Jack slowly, “would be for me to marry you and let her think that you are Janice in good earnest.”
“Oh, that wouldn’t do at all,” said the pretty widow. “In the first place she would go crazy at the idea of her darling nephew’s marrying her maid,—and in the second place—”
“Well,—in the second place?”