Mr. Van Ness returned to the Hemlock Farm at stated periods during the summer.  He had, to be plain, sat down before Jane’s heart to besiege it with the same ponderous benign calm with which he ate an egg or talked of death.  There was a bronze image of Buddha in the hall at the Farm, the gaze of the god fixed with ineffable content, as it had been for ages, on his own stomach.

Jane went up to it one day after an hour’s talk with Mr. Van Ness.  “This creature maddens me,” she said.  “I always want to break it into pieces to see it alter.”

Little Mr. Waring, who had come with Van Ness, hurried up as a connoisseur in bronzes, adjusting his eye-glasses.  “Why, it is faultless, Miss Swendon!” he cried.

“That is precisely what makes it intolerable.”

Much of Jane’s large, easy good-humor was gone by this time.  She had grown thin, was eager, restless, uncertain of what she ought or ought not to do, even in trifles.

Mr. Waring and Judge Rhodes were both at the Farm now.  They ran over to New York every week or two.  Phil Waring was not a marrying man, but it was part of his duty as a leader in society to be intimate with every important heiress or beauty in the two cities.  Out of sincere compassion to Jane’s stupendous ignorance he would sit for hours stroking his moustache, his elbows on his knees, his feet on a rung of the chair, dribbling information as to the nice effects in the Water-Color Exhibition, or miraculous “finds” of Spode or Wedgwood in old junk-shops, or the most authentic information as to why the Palfreys had no cards to Mrs. Livingstone’s kettledrums, while Jane listened with a quizzical gleam in her eyes, as she did to the little bantam hen outside cackling and strutting over its new egg.

“We must have you in society this winter,” he urged.  “It is a duty you owe in your position.  You have no choice about it.”

“You are right, Mr. Waring,” called the captain from the corner where he sat with Judge Rhodes.  “The child must have friends in her own class.”  He dropped his voice again:  “The truth is, Rhodes, she has no ties like other girls.  Her dog and two or three old women and some children—­that is all she knows of life.  It’s enough while she has me.  But I shall not be here long, now.  Not many months.”

The eyes of the two men met.

“Does she know?” asked the judge after a while.

“No.”  The captain’s gaunt features worked:  he trotted his foot to some tune, looking down from the window and whistling under his breath.  “It was for this I sent for you,” he added presently.  “If I could only see her settled, married, before I go!  She is no more fit to be left alone in the world than Bruno.”