He was not called upon, however, to take any violent steps, for Mrs. Chew presently said, “Well, Lady Barb, good-bye”; Mrs. Vanderdecken glared genially and as for excess of meaning at her hostess and addressed a farewell, accompanied very audibly with his title, to her host; and Sidney Feeder made a joke about stepping on the trains of the ladies’ dresses as he accompanied them to the door. Mrs. Chew had always a great deal to say at the last; she talked till she was in the street and then she addressed that prospect. But at the end of five minutes Jackson Lemon was alone with his wife, to whom he then announced a piece of news. He prefaced it, however, by an inquiry as he came back from the hall. “Where’s Agatha, my dear?” “I haven’t the least idea. In the streets somewhere, I suppose.” “I think you ought to know a little more.” “How can I know about things here? I’ve given her up. I can do nothing with her. I don’t care what she does.” “She ought to go back to England,” Jackson said after a pause. “She ought never to have come.” “It was not my proposal, God knows!” he sharply returned. “Mamma could never know what it really is,” his wife more quietly noted. “No, it hasn’t been as yet what your mother supposed! The man Longstraw wants to marry her and has made a formal proposal. I met him half an hour ago in Madison Avenue, and he asked me to come with him into the Columbia Club. There, in the billiard-room, which to-day is empty, he opened himself—thinking evidently that in laying the matter before me he was behaving with extraordinary propriety. He tells me he’s dying of love and that she’s perfectly willing to go and live in Arizona.” “So she is,” said Lady Barb. “And what did you tell him?” “I told him I was convinced it would never do and that at any rate I could have nothing to say to it. I told him explicitly in short what I had told him virtually before. I said we should send Aggie straight back to England, and that if they had the courage they must themselves broach the question over there.” “When shall you send her back?” asked Lady Barb. “Immediately—by the very first steamer.” “Alone, like an American girl?” “Don’t be rough, Barb,” Jackson replied. “I shall easily find some people—lots of them are sailing now.” “I must take her myself,” Lady Barb observed in a moment. “I brought her out—so I must restore her to my mother’s hands.”