Evans wished that Jane were there to see. To let him buy flowers for her—ices. He wondered if the time would come when he might buy her a spring hat. Well, why not? If things went like this with him! He knew he was getting back. He could see it in the eyes of women. Where once there had been pity—was now coquettish challenge. He was having invitations. He accepted only a few, but they came increasingly.
And clients came. Not many, but enough to point the way to success. He had sold more of the old books. His mother’s milk farm was becoming a fashionable fad.
Edith Towne had helped to bring Mrs. Follette’s wares before her friends. At all hours of the day they drove out, Edith with them. “It is such an adorable place,” she told Evans, “and your—mother! Isn’t she absolutely herself? Selling milk with that empress air of hers. I simply love her.”
Evans liked Edith Towne immensely. Even more than Baldy he divined her loneliness. “In that great house there isn’t a soul for real companionship. Towne’s eaten up with egotism, and the cousin is an echo.”
Edith asked herself out to dinner very often. “It is perfect with just the four of us,” she told Mrs. Follette, and that lady, flattered almost to tears, said, “Telephone whenever you can come and take pot-luck.”
Edith had planned to have dinner with them to-night. Evans took an early train to Sherwood. When he reached home Edith and his mother were on the porch and the Towne car stood before the gate.
“I’ve got to go back,” Edith explained. “Uncle Fred came in from Chicago an hour or two ago and telephoned that he must see me.”
“Baldy will be broken-hearted,” Evans told her, smiling.
“I couldn’t get him up. I tried, but they said he had left the office. I thought I’d bring him out with me.” She kissed Mrs. Follette. “I’ll come again soon, dear lady. And you must tell me when you are tired of me.”
Evans went to the car with her, and came back to find his mother in an exalted mood. “Now if you could marry a girl like Edith Towne.”