"You will not have a chance to prove it, Connie. He isn't coming back."
"Don't you believe it. I am quite sure he is a gentleman who always gets the worth of his money."
"What makes you say that?"
"Oh, I don't know; intuition, I suppose. That's what they call it in a woman, though I think it would be called good judgment in a man."
Taking him at his worst, Miss Elliott's terse characterization of Henry Jeffard was not altogether inaccurate, though, in the present instance, he would not have gone back to the theatre if he had known what else to do with himself. Indeed, he was minded not to go back, but a turn in the open air made him think better of it, and he strolled in as the curtain was rising. Whereupon the elderly man and the two young women had to stand again while he edged past them to his chair.
This time he remembered, and said something about being sorry to trouble them. Miss Elliott's chair was next to his, and she smiled and nodded reassuringly. Jeffard was moody and disheartened, and the nod and the smile went near to the better part of him. He kept his seat during the next intermission, and ventured a civil commonplace about the opera. The young woman replied in kind, and the wheel thus set in motion soon rolled away from the beaten track of trivialities into a path leading straight to the fulfillment of Miss Elliott's promise to her cousin.
"Then you haven't been long in Denver," she hazarded on the strength of a remark which betrayed his unfamiliarity with Colorado.
"Only a few weeks."
"And you like it? Every one does, you know."
Jeffard tried to look decorously acquiescent and made a failure of it.