"If you could like me a very little," he said eagerly, "perhaps in time you could—Jane, if you are fond of travel I would take you all over the world. You should see everything. I thought I was done with happiness till I saw you. I had nothing to look forward to. I had seen everything, tested everything, and found everything empty and hateful, but with you at my side— Won't you try to like me, Jane?"
What Jane would have replied, had she not glanced up on the instant, she never afterwards felt entirely sure. But glance up she did to meet Gwendolen's scornful eyes fixed full upon her as she whirled past them in the Aubrey-Blythe victoria, with a great show of Aubrey-Blythe liveries on the box.
Instantly the forlorn little shoot of gratitude which was trying its feeble best to masquerade as sentiment in Jane's lonely heart withered and died under the icy blast of impotent anger and fear which passed over her. "She will tell Aunt Agatha," thought poor Jane, "and Aunt Agatha will think I have lied to her about seeing Mr. Towle on the street."
By some untoward psychological process, quite unperceived by herself, the full torrent of Miss Blythe's wrath was instantly turned upon the man at her side.
"I think I must say good morning, Mr. Towle," she said coldly. "I am really very much occupied to-day. I am sure I thank you for thinking of me so kindly—" She stopped determinedly and held out her hand.
And the Hon. Wipplinger Towle, feeling himself to be dismissed in all the harrowing length and breadth of the word, took his leave of her instantly, with a courteous lifting of his hat which afforded Jane a parting glimpse of his prematurely bald head.
"It must be dreadful to be bald," reflected Jane, with vague contrition, as she walked away; "but I can't help it." The correlation of these two ideas being more intimate and profound than appears in a cursory reading of them.
The door of Lady Agatha's morning room stood open as Jane attempted to slip past it like a guilty shadow. Gwendolen, still attired in her hat and jacket, evidently saw her and apprised her mother of the fact, for Lady Agatha's pursuing voice arrested the girl in full flight toward her own room.
"You will, perhaps, be good enough to inform me, Jane, how you came to be on the street after I had locked you into your own room for the day," intoned Lady Agatha, in a terrible voice. "Deceitful, ungrateful, vulgar girl, that you are!"