When Mrs. Treharne, after leaving Louise and Jesse together, stepped into the car with Judd, she found that adipose man of finance chuckling softly to himself. She deigned not to inquire of him the reason for his chuckling—knowing, of course, that presently he would be volunteering that information himself.
"That was Jesse's car in front of the house, wasn't it, Tony?" he asked her, still chuckling unpleasantly as the car pulled away from the curb.
"Yes," she replied, alert of a sudden, but disdaining to appear so.
"Jesse is calling to see—er—your daughter, eh?" Judd asked, continuing his rumbling manifestations of joviality.
"He is," replied Mrs. Treharne, carefully screening her impatience to catch Judd's drift. "But I fail to see why that fact should incite you to give vent to such a harrowing series of low comedy chuckles."
"Quite so, quite so, my dear Antoinette," said Judd, soothingly, but not in the least diminishing his choppy cachinnatory performance.
Mrs. Treharne, with an air of disgust which merely screened her worried curiosity, permitted him to continue for a while. Then she said, with an air of gravity intended to drag him back to his naturally sullen state, but assumed also for the purpose of sounding him:
"Jesse was plainly struck with Louise on Sunday night last. Her position now, of course, is hideous. Jesse may be the solution."
Judd straightened himself in his seat and suddenly stopped chuckling. Then he glanced with quizzical keenness out of slitted eyes at his companion.
"Meaning, I suppose," he said, "that you have an idea that Jesse might take it into his head to marry her?"