Often during the weeks that followed he dwelt in her mind as she sat at her desk and stared out across the river, and several times that summer she started to walk to Silliston.  But always she turned back.  Perhaps she feared to break the charm of that memory....

CHAPTER IV

Our American climate is notoriously capricious.  Even as Janet trudged homeward on that Memorial Day afternoon from her Cinderella-like adventure in Silliston the sun grew hot, the air lost its tonic, becoming moist and tepid, white clouds with dark edges were piled up in the western sky.  The automobiles of the holiday makers swarmed ceaselessly over the tarvia.  Valiantly as she strove to cling to her dream, remorseless reality was at work dragging her back, reclaiming her; excitement and physical exercise drained her vitality, her feet were sore, sadness invaded her as she came in view of the ragged outline of the city she had left so joyfully in the morning.  Summer, that most depressing of seasons in an environment of drab houses and grey pavements, was at hand, listless householders and their families were already, seeking refuge on front steps she passed on her way to Fillmore Street.

It was about half past five when she arrived.  Lise, her waist removed, was seated in a rocking chair at the window overlooking the littered yards and the backs of the tenements on Rutger Street.  And Lise, despite the heaviness of the air, was dreaming.  Of such delicate texture was the fabric of Janet’s dreams that not only sordid reality, but contact with other dreams of a different nature, such as her sister’s, often sufficed to dissolve them.  She resented, for instance, the presence in the plush oval of Mr. Eustace Arlington; the movie star whose likeness had replaced Mr. Wiley’s, and who had played the part of the western hero in “Leila of Hawtrey’s.”  With his burning eyes and sensual face betraying the puffiness that comes from over-indulgence, he was not Janet’s ideal of a hero, western or otherwise.  And now Lise was holding a newspaper:  not the Banner, whose provinciality she scorned, but a popular Boston sheet to be had for a cent, printed at ten in the morning and labelled “Three O’clock Edition,” with huge red headlines stretched across the top of the page:—­

        “Juryfinds in miss NEALY’S favor.”

As Janet entered Lise looked up and exclaimed:—­“Say, that Nealy girl’s won out!”

“Who is she?” Janet inquired listlessly.

“You are from the country, all right,” was her sister’s rejoinder.  “I would have bet there wasn’t a Reub in the state that wasn’t wise to the Ferris breach of promise case, and here you blow in after the show’s over and want to know who Nelly Nealy is.  If that doesn’t beat the band!”

“This woman sued a man named Ferris—­is that it?”