Of course, there were others. There were men who came there, disturbingly enough, on occasions when Jimmy had hoped to find her alone; men who seemed to know a great deal about her pursuits, and who even had the audacity to make appointments with her for the following day or for other days, quite as though they had a right to do so. Generally speaking, however, the others may be said to have resolved themselves in time into a certain Mr. Ashby Feak; so that Jimmy's jealousies melted away, even as the other men melted away, and centred round Ashby Feak, and round him alone. Ashby Feak was a tall fair man, at whose age it would be difficult to guess, and concerning whose life various stories were told. He had been abroad a great deal, and had done something in the way of exploration in a mild way in various places; had written a little concerning his travels. That he was interesting there was not the slightest doubt; that he had a wider and a deeper knowledge and experience of the world than Jimmy was also beyond question. Daniel Baffall did not like him, and Mrs. Baffall was a little afraid of him; but he came often, nevertheless, and in a sense he monopolised the girl, after a time, as no other man had done. She still held to Jimmy in a half-hearted way; but Jimmy found it difficult to discover her alone, and the old cordial talks were things of the past. He manoeuvred to see more of her, and was sometimes successful; sometimes, in fact, he was able to take the girl, with Mrs. Baffall for company, to places into which Ashby Feak could not go; while Ashby Feak, on his side, could return that compliment easily enough. And Alice received both men apparently on equal terms--now and then bestowing a favour upon Jimmy, and the next moment taking it away from him, in a sense, for the better encouragement of Mr. Feak. In the long run, however, Jimmy told himself that Ashby Feak seemed to score more than he did. Jimmy was in that bitter mood engendered by the receipt of a note from her, suggesting that she would be unable to keep an appointment made with him, and suggesting further that he had been "horrid" to her the night before, when that hurried message came which summoned him to Charlie's bedside. All he heard was that a man was dying, and had craved to see him; he had no suspicion of who the man was. But the summons drove from his mind that lighter business of jealousy, and sent him off at once to find the man.