"And what are the circumstances?" asked Gracie incautiously.
"You're one," said Jack boldly.
"Here's breakfast. Charlie gave me to understand you had had nothing to eat for a week."
"Nothing half so good as this," said Jack, with an appreciative look at the cottage loaves and golden butter, and the great dish of ham and eggs Mrs. Jex had just brought in.
"My! but yo' do look rare and big and bonny," said that estimable woman. "I do think I'll cook ye some more eggs."
"Yes, do, Mrs. Jex," said Eager. "They don't get eggs like these in London."
And so they got through breakfast; but Jim was the quietest of the party, and Gracie got it into her head that he was in some dreadful mess, in spite of what Charlie had said. And just before they started for Carne she got hold of him for a minute, and asked:
"Jim, what's the trouble? Is it anything very bad?"
"It's nothing we've done, Grace," he said, with so frank a look in his own anxious eyes that she could not doubt him. "Just some old family matters that have cropped up." And though she could not doubt his word, he was so unlike himself that she watched them go in a state of extreme puzzlement as to what could have sapped Jim's spirits to such an unusual extent.
As a matter of fact, the strange disclosures of the previous night were weighing heavily upon him. With a vague, dull discomfort he was saying to himself that, as between himself and Jack, there could be no possible doubt as to which was the better man; and therefore--as he argued with himself--of the true stock. And, if that was so, he was simply superfluous and in everybody's way. He was not much good in the world, anyway. He felt as if he would be better out of it. If he were gone, Jack would take his proper place--and marry Gracie---- All the same, it was deucedly hard that one's life should be broken up like this through absolutely no fault of one's own. And to surrender all thought of Gracie---- Yes, that was the hardest thing of all. But she would go to Jack by rights, along with all the rest.