And, as things happen, it was just as Franz laid down his bow, after a brilliant rendering of a great concerto, that Mrs. Alexander King came in.  She entered noiselessly, a slender, tall, black-veiled figure, as scrupulously attired in her conventional deep mourning as if it were not hot June weather, when some lightening of her sombre garb would have seemed not only rational but kind to those who must observe her.

“Oh, mother!” King exclaimed.  “In all this heat?  I didn’t expect you.  I’m afraid you ought not to have come.”

She bent over him.  “The heat has nothing to do with my feelings toward my son.  I couldn’t neglect you, dear.”

She greeted Ellen cordially, who presented Miss Linton.  King lost nothing of his mother’s polite scrutiny of the girl, who bore it without the slightest sign of recognizing it beyond the lowering of her lashes after the first long look of the tall lady had continued a trifle beyond the usual limit.  Book agent though she might be, Miss Linton’s manner was faultless, a fact King noted with curious pride in his new friend—­whom, though he himself was meeting her for but the second time, he somehow wanted to stand any social test which might be put upon her.  And he well knew that his lady mother could apply such tests if anybody could.

In his heart he was saying that it seemed hard luck, he must say good-bye to Anne Linton in that mother’s presence.  There was small chance to make it a leave-taking of even ordinary good fellowship beneath that dignified, quietly appraising eye, to say nothing of endowing it with a quality which should in some measure compensate for the fact that it might be a parting for a long time to come.  However much or little the exchange of notes during these last weeks might have come to mean to Jordan King, aside from the diversion they had offered to one sorely oppressed of mind and body, he resented being now forced to those restrained phrases of farewell which he well knew were the only ones that would commend him to his mother’s approval.

Mrs. Burns and Miss Linton rose to go, summoned by Red Pepper himself, who was to take them.  In the momentary surge of greeting and small talk which ensued, King surreptitiously beckoned Anne near.  He looked up with the direct gaze of the man who intends to make the most of the little that Fate sends him.

“Letters are interesting things, aren’t they?” he asked.

“Very.  And when they are written by a man lying on his back, who doesn’t know when he is down, they are stimulating things,” she answered; and there was that in the low tone of her voice and the look of her eyes which was as if she had pinned a medal for gallantry on the breast of the black silk robe.

Mrs. Alexander King looked at her son—­and moved nearer.  She addressed Anne.  “I am more than glad to see, Miss Linton,” said she, “that you are fully recovered.  Please let me wish you much success in your work.  I suppose we shall not see you again after you leave Mrs. Burns.”