Another week sped its days through.  It was as the unwinding of a reel of silk, each day a round, each round and the body of the reel grew thinner and thinner, and the coils of silk lay wasted—­entangled on the floor.

Deep shadows settled under Sally’s eyes.  The disease of love-sickness has its common symptoms, the whole world knows them; the hungry self-interest that wears itself out into a hypochondriacal morbidity; the perverted power of vision, the hopeless want of philosophy; not to mention the hundred ailments of the body that beset every single one who suffers from the complaint.

Janet watched Sally closely through it all until, as the time passed by, even she began to think that her calculations had been at fault.

At last, one morning, there lay on the breakfast-table in the kitchen, a little brown-paper parcel addressed to Sally.  She picked it up eagerly and the flame flickered up into her cheeks as she laid it down again, unopened, in her lap.  Janet smiled across at her, but said nothing.  When breakfast was over, she let Sally go away by herself up to her bedroom, while she remained behind and talked to Mrs. Hewson.  Ten minutes, she gave her; then she mounted the stairs as well.  She did not knock.  She walked straight into the bedroom and there she found Sally, seated near the window, the tears coursing down her cheeks, while she held out her wrist and stared at a woven gold bangle that bore on it her name in diamond letters.  By the side of the empty box was a letter, well-folded, so that it could fit within, and on the floor lay the string and the brown paper, just as it had been torn off.

Janet stood in front of her, hands on hips, warmed with the sense of being a prophet in her own country.

“Are you satisfied now?” she asked.

Sally looked up; the pride of the woman in the bauble blent in her eyes with the disappointment of the woman in love.

“Isn’t it lovely?” she said pathetically.  “Oh, it is lovely.  I’ve never had anything so beautiful before.  But I can’t keep it.  How can I keep it?”

“Can’t keep it!” exclaimed Janet.  “What are you talking about?  Do you think it was given to you to look at and then return?  Why shouldn’t you keep it?  It’s got your name on.  He can’t give it to anybody else, unless there’s more than one Sally down his alley, which I should think is very doubtful.  What do you mean—­you can’t keep it?  You make me feel like Job’s wife.”

Sally unclasped the bangle and laid it back in the little velvet box with lingering fingers.  Then she picked up the letter.

“Read that,” she said.

Janet swept her eyes to it.  To her, as she read, it seemed to be the condensation of more than one letter that had been written before.  A man, she argued, who gives such a present, is more than probably in love; and a man who is in love, cannot write so directly to the point in his first attempt.