Constance returned to town, thinking to herself what a fool Crane must be not to be satisfied with such a wife as Annette. _Chapter Nine_ CONCERNING THINGS NOT TO BE MENTIONED IN THE SOCIETY JOURNALS The days went rapidly by for Crane, to whom they were full of events. The House committed fewer follies than might have been expected, and the management of the international crisis had put the country into a thoroughly good humour with both the House and the Administration. Crane gained steadily in consequence among the politicians, and it was with difficulty he kept his head; but he kept it. He did not relax his efforts to win his children’s hearts, and in the effort he began to feel a strange jealousy of Thorndyke, who had won them without any effort at all. Thorndyke had not only taken Roger and Elizabeth to the Zoo on the first Sunday, but on the next he had appeared, looking extremely sheepish, and had requested the pleasure of their company to the Zoo again. The children were in paroxysms of delight, and Annette laughed outright at Thorndyke, particularly when he admitted that he had declined an invitation to a breakfast at the Brentwood Baldwins on the ground of a previous engagement in order to carry out this little trip to the Zoo. The trio went off together in great spirits, and Crane and Annette were left alone. Through all the laughing and joking with the children, Crane had sat silent and sombre--they had not yet laughed and joked with him. Suddenly, he proposed a walk to Annette. It was so long since such a thing had occurred that he was embarrassed in giving the invitation, and she in accepting it; but they walked together along the country lanes in the quiet Sunday noon, and a shadow of the old confidence was restored between them. But Crane was still fully convinced that Annette was not cut out for the wife of a public man, and could not shine in cosmopolitan society. He was soon to have an opportunity to judge of her in this last particular. Constance Maitland had set her mind to work upon that difficult and interesting problem--the composition of a small dinner. More than that, she meant it to be one at which Annette would be at her best.