Frederick Towne had not expected what he found—the little house set high on its terraces seemed to give from its golden-lighted window squares a welcome in the dark. “I shan’t be long, Briggs,” he said to his chauffeur.
“Very good, sir,” said Briggs, and led the way up the terrace.
Baldy ushered Towne into the living-room, and Frederick, standing on the threshold, surveyed a coziness which reminded him of nothing so much as a color illustration in some old English magazine. There was the coal grate, the table drawn up to the fire, the twinkling silver on its massive tray, violets in a low vase—and rising to meet him a slender, glowing child, with a banner of orange wool behind her.
“Jane,” said young Barnes, “may I present Mr. Towne?” and Jane held out her hand and said, “This is very good of you.”
He found himself unexpectedly gracious. He was not always gracious. He had felt that he couldn’t be. A man with money and position had to shut himself up sometimes in a shell of reserve, lest he be imposed upon.
But in this warmth and fragrance he expanded. “What a charming room,” he said, and smiled at her.
Her first view of him confirmed the opinion she formed from his picture. He was apparently not over forty, a stocky, well-built, ruddy man, with fair hair that waved crisply, and with clear blue eyes, lighter, she learned afterward, than Edith’s, but with just a hint of that burning blue. He had the air of indefinable finish which speaks of a life spent in the right school and the right college, and the right clubs, of a background of generations of good blood and good breeding. He wore evening clothes, and one knew somehow that dinner never found him without them.
Yet in spite of these evidences of pomp and circumstance, Jane felt perfectly at ease with him. He was, after all, she reflected, only a gentleman, and Baldy was that. The only difference lay in their divergent incomes. So, as the two men talked, she knitted on, with the outward effect of placidity.
“Do you want me to go?” she had asked them, and Towne had replied promptly, “Certainly not. There’s nothing we have to say that you can’t hear.”
So Jane listened with all her ears, and modified the opinion she had formed of Frederick Towne from his picture and from her first glimpse of him. He was nice to talk to, but he might be hard to live with. He had obstinacy and egotism.