“You would think so if you knew what happened next,” thought Jess, but she dared not put that thought into speech. She said, instead: “As you may have heard, my visit to you was intercepted on the very morning I was to take the train in company with Lawyer Abbot, for New York, by a telegram informing us that you were away, and would not return for a few weeks. “My disappointment was so keen that, to assuage my great grief and dry my tears, Lawyer Abbot proposed that I should go somewhere, now that I was all ready to go, and proposed sending me to a relative of his, on a farm. “I hailed this eagerly--anything to get away from Blackheath Hall. Well, I was kindly received by the good farmer, and his wife and daughter, and there I spent the happiest days that I had ever known. I was loath to tear myself away from the place even when I received a letter from Lawyer Abbot, stating that you were now at home, in New York, and that he was coming to conduct me there at once. Ah, Queenie, when I left that farm, I left all the happiness that I had ever known behind me. I wrote to the man to whom I had betrothed myself that I wished to break the engagement; that it was impossible to ever marry him now, for I found that we were as wide apart as though we had never met, and that I had never had any love for him, and that he was to consider the matter irrevocably settled. “That is all my story, Queenie,” she concluded, and the girl that bent over her never dreamed that the most thrilling chapter in little Jess’ life history had been omitted from the tale. No one in the wide world would have guessed that little Jess had left--a husband on that lonely farm whom she had learned to love with all the strength of her young heart. She had obeyed his instructions to the letter, not to let any human being know of her marriage until he gave her permission to do so. “So there little Jess’ romance seems to end,” murmured Queenie. The girl nodded and hid her face, painful with rosy blushes, upon the shoulder of her false friend. “Now I am going to tell you a little romance which will no doubt surprise you very much, Jess,” declared Queenie, “and I will begin with the statement that I know John--John Dinsmore, the lover whom you have so foolishly discarded--very well.” “You know him?” gasped Jess, opening her great, dark, velvety eyes very wide and wonderingly. Queenie nodded assent, adding: “I knew all about his courtship, for he made a confidant of me, writing me all about it, as we were such very old friends.” Before Jess could speak she went on hurriedly: “You are making the greatest mistake of your life, dear, in attempting to break your engagement with him, for he loves you so passionately that he can never live without you--he said that in his letter to me--that if anything happened to part you, that he would shoot himself, and put an end to his sorrow and despair.”