Jan and Her Job

by L. Allen Harker

"It would make it easier for both of us if you'd face it, my dear."

Fay shook her head. "I know it's mean to shuffle out of it all, but I am so tired. Do you think it very horrid of me, Jan?"

In silence Jan held her close; and in that moment she faced it.

The days went on, strange, quiet days of brilliant sunshine. Their daily life shrouded from the outside world even as the verandah was shrouded from the sun when Lalkhan let down the chicks every day after tiffin.

Peter was their only visitor besides the doctor, and Peter came practically every day. He generally took Jan out after tea, sometimes with the children, sometimes alone. He even went with her to the bank in Elphinstone Circle, so like a bit of Edinburgh, with its solid stone houses, and found that Hugo actually had lodged fifty pounds there in Fay's name. The clerks looked curiously at Jan, for they thought she was Mrs. Tancred. Every one in business or official circles in Bombay knew about Hugo Tancred. His conduct had, for a while, even ousted the usual topics of conversation—money, food, and woman—from the bazaars; and an exhaustive discussion of it was only kept out of the Native Press by the combined efforts of the Police and his own Department. Jan gained from Peter a fairly clear idea of the débâcle that had occurred in Hugo Tancred's life. She no longer wondered that Fay refused to leave the bungalow. She began to feel branded herself.

For Jan, Peter's visits had come to have something of the relief the loosening of a too-tight

bandage gives to a wounded man. He generally came at tea-time when Fay was at her best, and he brought her news of her little world at Dariawarpur. To her sister he seemed the one link with reality. Without him the heavy dream would have gone on unbroken. Fay was always most eager he should take Jan out, and, though at first Jan had been unwilling, she gradually came to look upon such times as a blessed break in the monotonous restraint of her day. With him she was natural, said what she felt, expressed her fears, and never failed to return comforted and more hopeful.

One night he took her to the Yacht Club, and Jan was glad she had gone, because it gave her so much to tell Fay when she got back.

It was a very odd experience for Jan, this tea on the crowded lawn of the Yacht Club. She turned hot when people looked at her, and Jan had always felt so sure of herself before, so proud to be a daughter of brilliant, lovable Anthony Ross.

Here, she knew that her sole claim to notice was that she had the misfortune to be Hugo Tancred's sister-in-law. Fay, too, had once been joyfully proud and confident—and now!