He looked at her with an approval that gradually merged into a sense of comfort.  She had chosen the simplest dress and hat in her wardrobe, as significant of a chastened soul; but simplicity more than anything else emphasized her distinction.  “She’ll be all right,” he said, consolingly, to himself.  “Whatever happens she’s the kind to come out on top.  Rupert Ashley would be a fool to throw over a superb, high-spirited creature like that.  He’ll not do it.  Of that I feel sure.”

The conviction helped him to settle more luxuriously into the depths of his couch and to relish the flavor of his cigar.  He was quite sincere in the feeling that if she were but safe he should be more or less indifferent to the deluge overwhelming himself.

“Papa,” she ventured at last, watching carefully the action of the little silver button-hook, as she buttoned her gloves, “if that Mr. Davenant came while I’m gone, you wouldn’t change your mind, would you?”

“I don’t think he’s in the least likely to turn up.”

“But if he did?”

“Well, I suppose you’ll be back before long.  We couldn’t settle anything without talking it over, in any case.”

Forced to be content with that, she kissed him and turned away.

[Illustration:  SHE FOUND COMFORT IN GETTING INTO THE OPEN AIR]

She found a comfort in getting into the open air, into the friendly streets, under the shade of the familiar trees, that surprised her.  The absence of pose characteristic of the average American town struck her for the first time as soothing.  With none of the effort to make life conform to a rigid standard of propriety, which in an English community would be the first thing to notice, there was an implied invitation to the spirit to relax.  In the slap-dash, go-as-you-please methods of building, paving, and cleaning she saw a tacit assumption that, perfection being not of this world, one is permitted to rub along without it.  Rodney Lane, which in Colonial days had led to Governor Rodney’s “Mansion,” had long ago been baptized Algonquin Avenue by civic authorities with a love of the sonorous, but it still retained the characteristics of a New England village street.  Elms arched over it with the regularity of a Gothic vaulting, and it straggled at its will.  Its houses, set in open lawns, illustrated all the phases of the national taste in architecture as manifested throughout the nineteenth century, from the wooden Greek temple with a pillared facade of the early decades to the bizarre compositions, painted generally in dark red and yellow, with many gables and long sweeps of slanting roof, which marked that era’s close.  In most cases additions had been thrown out from time to time, ells trailing at the back, or excrescences bulging at the sides, that were not grotesque only because there had been little in the first effect to spoil.  In more than one instance the original fabric was altered beyond recognition; here and there