"Dear, if you feel well enough, I should like you to send a kind little note to Jesse Devereaux, thanking him for the flowers he has been sending every day."
"I will write," Liane replied, with a blush and a quickened heartbeat, and her fond mother added:
"Jesse is a fine young man, and admires you very much."
When he received the note, so neatly and gracefully written, without a mistake in wording or spelling, Devereaux was puzzled.
It was certainly not like the writing of the letter in which she had rejected him. He concluded that her mother or her maid Sophie had written it.
"Poor girl, she will have to have private instructors to repair the defects in her education," he thought.
A few days before Christmas the Clarkes bade a kind farewell to the good-natured Mrs. Brinkley and Lizzie White, and returned to Stonecliff, whither the news had preceded them in letters to friends.
Devereaux was at the station to bid them farewell, and by the most open hinting he managed to secure from Mrs. Clarke an invitation to spend Christmas with them at Cliffdene.
He arrived on Christmas morning, and was presently shown into the holly-wreathed library, where Liane was sitting alone, exquisitely gowned in dark-blue silk, from which her fair face arose like a beautiful lily.
Devereaux's greeting was joyous, but Liane was cold and constrained. She could not forget how he had snubbed her in Boston when she was only a poor working girl.