I looked over at Jimmy.  She had got me by the hand, and Jimmy was making frantic gestures to tell her the whole thing and be done with it.  But I had gone too far.  The mill of the gods had crushed me already, and I didn’t propose to be drawn out hideously mangled and held up as an example for the next two or three weeks, although it was clear enough that Aunt Selina disapproved of me thoroughly, and would have been glad enough to find that no tie save the board of health held us together.  And then Bella came in, and you wouldn’t have known her.  She had put on a straight white woolen wrapper, and she had her hair in two long braids down her back.  She looked like a nice, wide-eyed little girl in her teens, and she had some lobster salad and a glass of port on a tray.  When she saw the situation, she put the things down and had the nastiness to stay and listen.

“I’m not blind,” Aunt Selina said, with one eye on the tray.  “You two silly children adore each other; I saw some things last night.”

Bella took a step forward; then she stopped and shrugged her shoulders.  Jim was purple.

“I saw you kiss her in the dining room, remember that!” Aunt Selina went on, giving the screw another turn.

It was Bella’s turn to be excited.  She gave me one awful stare, then she fixed her eyes on Jim.

“Besides,” Aunt Selina went on, “you told me today that you loved her.  Don’t deny it, James.”

Bella couldn’t keep quiet another instant.  She came over and stood at the foot of the bed.

“Please don’t excite yourself, dear Miss Caruthers,” she said in a voice like ice.  “Every one knows that he loves her; he simply overflows with it.  It—­it is quite a by-word among their friends.  They have been sitting together in a corner all evening.”

Yes, that was what she said; when I had not spoken to Jimmy the whole time in the den.  Bella was cattish, and she was jealous, too.  I turned on my heel and went to the door; then I turned to her, with my hand on the knob.

“You have been misinformed,” I said coldly.  “You can not possibly know, having spent three hours in a corner yourself—­with Mr. Harbison.”  I abhor jealousy in a woman.

Well, Aunt Selina ate all the lobster salad, and drank the port after Bella had told her it was beef, iron and wine, and she slept all night, and was able to sit up in a chair the next day, and was so infatuated with Bella that she would not let her out of her sight.  But that is ahead of the story.

At midnight the house was fairly quiet, except for Jim, who kept walking around the halls because he couldn’t sleep.  I got up at last and ordered him to bed, and he had the audacity to have a grievance with me.

“Look at my situation now!” he said, sitting pensively on a steam radiator.  “Aunt Selina is crazy.  I only kissed your hand, anyhow, and I don’t know why you sat in the den all evening; you might have known that Bella would notice it.  Why couldn’t you leave me alone to my misery?”