Olive did not ask Jane, however, and after one more ride with her, Peter suddenly became too busy to accept her invitations. Olive went off by herself one day, suffered a fall and a sprained shoulder, and was thereby initiated at last into Jane's friendship.
"My sister sent me over," said Murray Townsend, one June evening, to Jane, who, hemming a tiny ruffle, sat in the western sunlight upon the little back porch, where the family now spent their evenings, enjoying the first blossomings of the small garden. "She's been fretting all day with that shoulder of hers she hurt last week, and vows she can't get through the evening with me. The others are all away--as usual. Won't you do us the favour of coming over?"
"Was it really her suggestion--or yours?" Jane challenged him, for it was not the first time he had made the attempt, upon one excuse or or another, to get her across the street.
"Hers, on my honour, though I 'll admit I seconded the motion. She really wants you. She's lying on a couch round on the side porch. It's a jolly place, or would be if it--had you in it," he nearly said, but discreetly substituted--"had such a nice crowd in it as this."
He glanced from one to another of the group upon the little porch. Ross was softly breathing notes from a flute. Mr. and Mrs. Bell sat side by side, in happy comradeship. Peter, his long legs extending well out upon the grass before the porch, whittled at a bit of wood; and Nancy, close beside her cousin Ross, was holding for him a page of music, which he evidently was trying for the first time.
"Stay with them, if you 'd like to," suggested Jane, softly, as she put away her work and prepared to accept his invitation. "You know they always like to have you--every one of them--and I can slip across by myself. I 'll take her some of my mignonette and June roses."
"Thank you for your kind permission," answered Murray, following Jane's white-clad figure slowly down to the mignonette-bed at the farther end of the garden, "but I 'd rather accept it some evening when Miss Jane Bell is to be at home. 'Hamlet' with Ophelia left out would n't be much more of a play than it would be minus the melancholy gentleman himself."
Armed with a great bunch of the fragrant blossoms from the garden, Jane accompanied Murray across Gay Street, through the gate in the high hedge, and over the lawn and round the house to the great sheltered porch on the other side, its tall columns making it as great a contrast to the miniature place she had just left as could be imagined. Rugs carpeted the floor, big bamboo and rush chairs invited repose, and screens hung ready to be dropped, and to shut it quite away from invading breezes.
On a wide, richly cushioned settee lay Olive, listless and unhappy. She scanned Jane closely, noted that her visitor was not less attractively, if far less expensively, dressed than herself, and lifted to her face eyes into which had suddenly come a look of relief and interest.
"For me?" she asked, as Jane put the flowers into her outstretched hands. "Oh, how sweet! Why don't we have such mignonette as that in our gardens?"