With a sudden, jerk Jerrie withdrew her hand from his and stepped back into the crowd, her heart beating wildly, and her cheeks burning with shame, as she thought what she had done and how it must have mortified Harold.

Maude was speaking to him now—­Maude with her bright black eyes and brilliant color.  But she was neither crying nor strangling him with kisses.  She was shaking hands with him very decorously, and telling him how pleased and glad she was.  And in his hand he held her roses, which he occasionally smelled as he listened, and smiled upon her with that peculiar smile of his which made him so attractive.  But the lilies were nowhere to be seen; and when, an hour later, all the baskets and bouquets bearing his name were piled together, the lilies were not there.

’He has thrown them away!  He did not care for them at all, and I might as well have staid in bed as to have gotten up at four o’clock and risked my neck to get them.  He likes Maude and her roses better than he does me,’ Jerrie thought, with a swelling heart and all through the journey home—­for they returned that night—­she was very quiet and tactiturn, letting Maude do all the talking, and saying when asked why she was so still, that her head was aching, and that she was too tired and sleepy to talk.

That was the last time for years that Jerrie put her arms around Harold’s neck, or touched her lips to his; for it had come to her like a blow how much he was to her, and, as she believed, how little she was to him.

’Maude is preferred to me—­I see it now so plainly; he likes me well enough, but he loves her—­I saw it in the way he looked at her that time I mortified him so dreadfully with my gush,’ she thought; and although of all her girl friends, not even excepting Nina St. Claire, Maude was the nearest and dearest, she was half-glad when a week or two later, Maude said good-bye to her, and with her mother sailed away to Europe, where she remained for more than a year and a half.

During her absence the two girls corresponded regularly, and Jerrie never failed to write whatever she thought would please her friend to hear of Harold; and when at last Maude returned, and wrote to Jerrie of failing health, and wakeful nights, and lonely days, and her longing for the time when Jerrie would be home, and be with her, and read to her, or recite bits of poetry, as she had been wont to do, Jerrie trampled every jealous, selfish thought under her feet, and in her letters to Harold urged him to see Maude as often as possible, and read to her whenever she wished him to do so.

‘You have such a splendid voice, and read so well,’ she wrote, ’that it will rest her just to listen to you, and will keep her from being so lonely; so offer your services if she does not ask for them—­that’s a good boy.’

Then, as she remembered how weak Maude was, mentally, she thought: 

’He never can be happy with her as she is now.  A girl who cannot do a sum in simple fractions, and who, when abroad, thought only of Rome as a good place in which to buy sashes and ribbons, and who asked me in a letter to tell her who all those Caesars were, and what the Forum was for, is not the wife for a man like Harold, and however much he might love her at first he would be sure to tire of her after a while, unless he can bring her up.  Possibly he can.’