On the way she found it amusing to consider Jack judicially as a human exhibit, stripped of all the chimera of romance with which Little Rivers had clothed his personality.  If he had not happened to meet her on the pass, the townspeople would have regarded this stranger as an invasion of real life by a character out of a comic opera.  She viewed the specimen under a magnifying glass in all angles, turning it around as if it were a bronze or an ivory statuette.

1.  In his favor:  Firstly, children were fond of him; but his extravagance of phrase and love of applause accounted for that.  Secondly, Firio was devoted to him.  Such worshipful attachment on the part of a native Indian to any Saxon was remarkable.  Yet this was explained by his love of color, his foible for the picturesque, his vagabond irresponsibility, and, mostly, by his latent savagery—­which she would hardly have been willing to apply to Ignacio’s worshipful attachment to herself.

2.  Against him:  Everything of any importance, except in the eyes of children and savages; everything in logic.  He would not stand analysis at all.  He was without definite character.  He was posing, affected, pleased with himself, superficial, and theatrical, and interested in people only so long as they amused him or gratified his personal vanity.

“I had the best of the argument in leaving the jelly on the hedge, and that is the last I shall hear of it,” she concluded.

Not so.  Mrs. Galway came that evening, a bearer of messages.

“He says it is the most wonderful jelly that ever was,” said Mrs. Galway.  “He ate half the glass for dinner and is saving the rest for breakfast—­I’m using his own words and you know what a killing way he has of putting things—­saving it for breakfast so that he will have something to live through the night for and in the morning the joy of it will not be all a memory.  He wants to know if you have any more of the same kind.”

“Yes, a dozen glasses,” Mary returned.  “Tell him we are glad of the opportunity of finishing last year’s stock, and I send it provided he eats half a glass with every meal.”

“I don’t know what his answer will be to that,” said Mrs. Galway, contracting her brow studiously at Mary.  “But he would have one quick.  He always has.  He’s so poetic and all that, we’re planning to go to the station to see him off and pelt him with flowers; and Dr. Patterson is going to fashion a white cat out of white carnations, with deep red ones for the black stripes, for the children to present.”

“Hurrah!” exclaimed Mary blithely, and went for the jelly.

She was spared further bulletins on the state of health of the wounded until her father returned from his daily call the next morning.  She was in the living-room and she knew by his step on the porch, vigorous yet light, that he was uplifted by good news or by the anticipation of the exploitation of some new idea—­a pleasure second only to that of the idea’s birth.  Such was his elation that he broke one of his own rules by tossing some of the books loaned to Jack onto the broad top of the table of the living-room, which was sacred to the isolation of the ivory paper-knife.