"In my case, Etta," the consul followed her story, after an interval, "it was a landlady's daughter. I don't believe I have ever spoken of her to you. I was in college, but I boarded outside the buildings. I wrote to my father and begged him to let me go into business so that I could earlier support a wife and family. The wise man let me go down to a fruit-farm in Florida. You have noticed that I know something about orange-growing. It was not quite a year before the dear divinity whose name was Lottie found it too long to wait. I posted home. The room I had once rented from her mother was let to a handsomer man. I took up my studies where I had dropped them, and to all appearance there was little harm done. But for a long time I thought I should die a bachelor." "I know. Your cousin Fannie told me about it in the early days, before we were engaged. It all goes to show.... And there again was Selina Blackstone, one of my girlhood friends. She had a cough and they thought her lungs affected and sent her South. There she met an unhappy boy in the same case, only he, as it proved, really was in a bad way with his lungs. The poor things fell desperately in love with each other, but her parents wouldn't hear of their marrying, in which course they were right. Now you would have thought from her face that the separation was going to kill her. It didn't, that's all. He died, and she married. And it can't be said of her that she was either shallow, or fickle, or heartless. I knew her very well. Merely, time did the work that time was set to do." There was in the lady's tone an effect of protest against any view, determination against any theory, but her own. "There are the cases like Miss Seymour's, however," Mr. Foss brought in softly, as one calls to another's attention a lapse of memory or a slip in logic. "Miss Seymour? Blanche? What about her?" "That she is Miss Seymour, my dear, and to my mind a melancholy lesson. Because Nature so plainly had not planned her for an old maid. Her mother--who told me? I think it was Miss Brown--interfered with her marrying the man she wished to, and she has accepted nothing in his place. It has been an empty life. And so it goes. One can't be sure, Etta." "Jerome," Mrs. Foss's voice rose to a sharper protest and firmer rejection, "those are the cases we simply must not allow ourselves to think about. If we begin to think of cases like that...." She did not finish and he said no more, but in the darkness through which the fiery point of his cigar continued for some time to glow, it is to be feared the faces of both went on to reflect for nobody to see the working of those thoughts precisely which Mrs. Foss had said with so much emphasis they must guard against. CHAPTER II