Burnett sucked in his breath with a sudden compression of his lips.
“All right,” he said, not unkindly; “but I don’t believe you’ll ever get her, and that’s flat. There are too many being entered for that race, and long before you and I get out of here she’ll be Mrs. Somebody Else.”
Jack stared at him as if he hardly heard, and then suddenly he stepped nearer and spoke.
“Did she ask you to have this talk with me?”
“No,” said the brother in surprise, “she never says anything about you to me.”
A look of relief fled across his friend’s face, and then a look of resolution succeeded it.
“I’m not going to be discouraged,” he said; “not for a while, at any rate.”
“You’d better be.”
Jack laughed. The laugh sounded a trifle hollow, but still it was a laugh, and that in itself was a triumph of which none but himself might ever measure the extent.
Because in that moment he decided to lay the whole case before her the next time that he went to town, and the coming to a resolution was a relief from the uncertainty that clouded his days and nights—even if a further black curtain of darkest doubt hung before the possibilities of what her answer might be.