"You haven't broken with her—have you?" I asked.
"She'll have to forgive and forget, and all that sort of thing. If it was Miss Phillips, I wouldn't be so confoundedly cut up about it."
"Why—what is it? who is it? and what do you mean?"
Jack looked at me. Then he looked down, and frowned. Then he looked at me again; and then he said, slowly, and with powerful effort:
CHAPTER IV.
"IT'S—THE—THE WIDOW! IT'S MRS.—FINNIMORE!!!"
Had a bombshell burst—but I forbear. That comparison is, I believe, somewhat hackneyed. The reader will therefore be good enough to appropriate the point of it, and understand that the shock of this intelligence was so overpowering, that I was again rendered speechless.
"You see," said Jack, after a long and painful silence, "it all originated out of an infernal mistake. Not that I ought to be sorry for it, though. Mrs. Finnimore, of course, is a deuced fine woman. I've been round there ever so long, and seen ever so much of her; and all that sort of thing, you know. Oh, yes," he added, dismally; "I ought to be glad, and, of course, I'm a deuced lucky fellow, and all that; but—"
He paused, and an expressive silence followed that "but."
"Well, how about the mistake?" I asked.