[Illustration:  “We must not allow the men to get sore over this matter of the League”]

“I asked young Mr. Hayes to take me fishing with him to-morrow in order to have a whole quiet day with him alone so that we could get closely in touch with each other.  I have had very little opportunity to talk with him, but I have felt his sympathy in several interested glances we have exchanged with each other.  I am looking forward to the establishment of a perfect friendship with him.”

I told myself that I was mistaken in thinking that the expression in Jane’s eyes was softened to the verge of dreaminess and my inmost soul shouted at the idea of Jane and Polk and their day alone in the woods.

Since that night that Polk humiliated me as completely as a man can humiliate a woman, he has looked at me like a whipped child, and I haven’t looked at him at all I have used Jane as a wide-spread fan behind which to hide from him.  How was I to know what was going on on the other side of the fan?

It is a relief to realize that in the world there are at least a few women like Jane that don’t have to be protected from Polk and his kind.  Jane is one of the hunted that has turned and has come back to meet the pursuer with outstretched and disarming hand.  This, I suspect, is to be about her first real tussle; skoal to the victor!

“I advised your Aunt Augusta to ask you to talk again to your Uncle Peter, and Nell is to seek an interview with Mr. Hardin at her earliest opportunity, though I think the only result will be instruction and uplift for Nell, as a more illumined thing I never had said to me on the subject of the relation of men and women than the one he uttered to me last night, as he said good-by to me out on the porch in that glorious moonlight that seems brighter here in Glendale than I have ever seen it out in the world anywhere else.”

“What did he say?” I asked perfectly naturally, though a double-bladed pain was twisted around in my solar plexus as the vision of Jane’s last night interview in the moonlight with the Crag, and Nell’s soon-to-be-one, hit me broadside at the same time.  I haven’t had one by myself with him for a week.

“Why, of course, women are the breath that men draw into their lungs of life to supply eternal combustion,” was what he said when I asked him point-blank what he thought of the League.  “Only let us breathe slowly as we ascend to still greater elevations with their consequent rarefied air,” he added, with the most heavenly thoughtfulness in his fine face.  “Did it ever occur to you, Evelina, that your Cousin James is really a radiantly beautiful man?  How could you be so mistaken, as to both him and his personal appearance, as to apply such a name as Crag to him?”

Glendale is going to Jane’s head!

“Don’t you think he looks scraggy in that long-tailed coat, shocks of taggy hair and a collar big enough to fit Old Harpeth?” I asked deceitfully.