But no matter how he tried to dismiss the matter from his mind he had found himself asking, through the courses of that important dinner and now in the pauses of his conversation with Miss Jeffries—­Was there really some girl?  Had he only dreamed that tense anxiety of Jack’s—­had Jack led them on for his own young amusement?

But it was not long possible to maintain an inner communion with Jinny Jeffries for a vis-a-vis.

A divided mind could not companion her swift flights and sudden tangents.  Deriding now her silly anxieties and deploring McLean’s unnecessary trip, she had branched into the consideration of how busy McLean must be—­and McLean found himself somehow embarked in sketchy descriptions of the institution of which Miss Jeffries seemed to think he was the backbone and of its very interesting work throughout the country.

And as he had talked he found himself noticing things that he had never noticed before about girls, the wave of bright hair against a flushed cheek, the dimples in a rounded arm, the slim grace of crossed ankles and silver-slippered feet.

“And you live all alone in that big house?” Jinny was murmuring.

“Not exactly alone.”  McLean smiled.  “There’s Mohammed and Hassan and Abdullah and Alewa and Saord-el-Tawahi—­”

“What do you call him when you are in a hurry?” laughed the girl.

It was a tremendously pleasant evening.  He had expected constraint and secret embarrassment and he had discovered this delightful interest and bright vivacity.

And if beneath that interest and vivacity something lay forever stilled and chilled in Miss Jeffries’ breast—­like a poor hidden corpse beneath bright roses—­why at two and twenty expectancies flourish so gayly that one lone bud is not long missed.  And chagrin is sometimes a salutary transient shower, and self-confidence is all the more delicate for a dimming cloud.

Moreover McLean’s unconscious absorption was balm and blessing.

When in startled realization of time and place he rose at last and she murmured laughing, “And after all you never met Aunt and Uncle!” he felt a queer blush tingle his cheek bones and a daring impulse shape the thought aloud that in that case he must come again.

“We’re here five days more,” said Jinny, the explicit.

Thoughtfully he repeated, “Five days,” and said farewell.

“Now if he decorously waits to the next to the last day—!” murmured Jinny to herself, her opinion of the Scots race hanging in the balance.

He didn’t.  But it was not the initiative of the Scots race which brought him to her, late that very next afternoon, but a soiled looking note which he held crumpled in his hand.

He found her at tea upon the veranda with her aunt and uncle and while he made conversation with the Pendletons he gave Miss Jeffries the note.

“From our friend Ryder,” he said with forced lightness.  “It explains itself.”