"Damn it, Towle!" blustered Mr. Robert Aubrey-Blythe, in the language of the hunting field; "I can't follow your lead, sir; I'd come a damned cropper, if I tried."
"Don't try, then," advised Mr. Towle curtly.
Being duly presented to the bride and to the groom, who comported himself on the happy occasion with an ease and composure which Lady Agatha Aubrey-Blythe later characterized as "brazen American boldness," Mr. Towle shook hands with both, with such a singular and unpleasant mist clouding his glass that he was immediately thereafter obliged to resort to a vigorous and prolonged use of his large, scented cambric handkerchief. And this circumstance spared him the knowledge of Jane's smiling coldness of manner.
Later in the evening Mr. Towle found himself unable to resist the opportunity of a tête-à-tête which Gwendolen's half sneering, half curious appropriation of the young American made possible. Jane was seated upon a sofa engaged in a wholly hollow and perfunctory conversation with Lady Agatha, when Mr. Towle tentatively approached. Lady Agatha instantly made room for him with an air of undisguised relief which brought a faint smile to Jane's lips.
When she looked up to greet her late elderly suitor she was still smiling, and the circumstance gave him courage to say, rather stiffly: "I have not as yet—er—spoken with you upon the subject of your marriage, Mrs.—ah—Everett; I trust you will permit me to wish you all happiness, and—er——"
"Thank you, Mr. Towle," said Jane sweetly.
She had already acquired, he reflected, the self-possessed air of the young matron, and her clear eyes were gazing at him with a shade of retrospection in their depths. She was thinking—and the man was unhappily aware of the fact—"what if I had married you!"
She sighed gently and stole a glance at her young husband, who was smiling with open amusement at Gwendolen's clumsy attempts to make game of him. "I fear," she said kindly, "that I was very rude to you the last time I saw you. But I——"
He waited for her to go on.
"I was really very unhappy, and when one is unhappy——"