A change came over Jessie's manner. "You mustn't go!" she said, with sudden vehemence. "It isn't right, Ned."
"Not right, my dear. Why?" Lance bent his earnest, clean-cut features to look down at her more searchingly.
But Jessie lowered her eyes, and would not meet his glance. "Oh, I have watched you," she said, "and you are often talking with Dennie; you talk about that girl, I am sure. And now she is writing to you. Don't you think you have done enough for her, without going to see her?"
"Perhaps so," said Lance, his energetic mind arrested by a sudden discontent, and by a wonder as to whether he had unconsciously fallen into error. "But surely you don't allow yourself to be troubled about it, do you?"
"Why, no," Jessie answered. "It would be foolish to do that. Why should I? Only, it may be that you don't think what you're doing, Ned. She is not our friend, and she never can be. I have agreed that you should be her benefactor if you want to. But think how it might seem for you to go up there and call on her. Isn't it too much?"
"I will do as you think best, my dear," Lance assented.
"Thank you," said Jessie, at once growing radiant.
They passed on through the sun-flecked gallery of the spicy woods, chatting on various topics, and were outwardly quite content. But Lance could not banish the idea that he had been deprived of something which was his right; and Jessie, for her part, was not nearly so serene as she appeared to be. A subtle intuition had warned her that Lance was wrapped up in his care for Adela to an extent which he himself was not able to measure. The circumstance weighed upon her with increasing force; and many times at night she had been awakened by her own tears, only to fret out the solitary hours with vain questionings and attempts at reassurance. Her trouble seemed needless and absurd; but somehow Adela Reefe came flitting across her dreams, and even darkened her waking moments, like a shadow revived from the past, that had the power to blot out the vivid and sunny present.
That evening the lovers looked over some old miniatures of former Floyds and of the Wyldes, from whom the colonel traced his inheritance. In every one of the female faces Lance instinctively hunted for traits that should account for Jessie's features; but he could not find any. Not only was he baffled in the search, but when he retired to rest the old puzzle as to the similarity between Jessie's face and Adela's grew upon him, as more complicated and less easy to shake off than ever.
A few nights afterward his hands clasped Jessie's cheeks as he bade her farewell, on his departure for Beaufort, where he was to take a coast-wise steamer for New York.