She pointed to a wooden chair near the door, where Tom sat down, wholly nonplussed, and not knowing at all what to say first.

Never before had he been received in this fashion, and it struck him that there was something incongruous between himself, in his dainty attire, with a cluster of beautiful roses in his hand, and that chair, minus a back, in the woodshed, where the smell of the soapsuds would have made him faint and sick if he had not been so near to the open door.

Tom had not slept well the previous night.  He had joined the fine dinner-party his mother had given to the Hart’s, and St. Claire’s and Atherton’s, and had sat next to Fred Raymond’s sister Marian, a very pretty young girl with a good deal that was foreign in her style and in her accent, for she had been in Europe nine years, and had only just come home.  Everything in her manner was perfect, from her low, well-modulated voice, to her sweet, musical laugh, and Tom acknowledged to himself that she was the most highly polished and cultivated girl he had ever met; and still she tired him, and he was constantly contrasting her with Jerrie, and thinking how much better he should enjoy himself if she were there beside him, with her ready wit and teasing remarks, which frequently amounted almost to ridicule.  Jerrie had been very gracious to him on the train, and had laughed and joked with him quite as much as she had with Dick St. Clare.

‘Perhaps she likes me better than I have supposed she did,’ he thought.  ’Anyway, I’d better be on hand, now she is at home and can see Harold every day.  He don’t care a copper for Maude, or wouldn’t if she didn’t run after him so much, and that will sicken him pretty soon, now that he has Jerrie.  By George, I believe I’d be as poor as he is, and paint for a living, if I couldn’t have Jerrie without it.  But I think I can; anyway, I am going to try.  She cannot be insensible to the advantage it would be to her to be my wife, and eventually the mistress of Tracy Park.  There is not a girl in the world who would not consider twice before she threw such a chance away.’

Such was the nature of Tom’s reflections all through the dinner, and to him the tiresome talk which followed it and the short summer night during which he was planning his mode of attack.

‘I’ll call in the morning and take her some roses; she likes flowers,’ he thought.  ’I wonder what she did with those I gave her at Vassar?  They were not with her on the car, unless she hid them in the paper box she carried so carefully.  Yes, I guess they were there, and I shall see them standing around some where.’

And this was the secret of Tom’s early call.  He had thought at first to walk, but had changed his mind, and driven down to the cottage in his light buggy, with the intention of asking Jerrie to drive with him along the river road.  But she did not look much like driving as she stood there by the wash-tub in that working-dress, which he thought the most charming of anything he had ever seen, notwithstanding his chagrin that the future Mrs. Tom Tracy should ever come in contact with anything as vulgar as soapsuds and pounding barrels.  How beautiful she was in that short dress, with her bare arms, the whitest he had ever seen, and how pretty her feet looked in the red stockings and slippers, which he would have sworn were threes instead of fours and a half.