She had “quit him cold,” his self-selected lady. True, she had done so several times before. But it mattered more now. He had declared his fealty; to some extent, had proved it; had hoped that he was gaining in her esteem. Now he was dropped, like a superfluous cat, in a strange alley. He felt as flattened-out as the cement of the pavement on which he stood. Into it, through the soles of his boots, his heart seemed to sink from its weight ... down ... down. But as his heart sank, his mind rose in a malediction strong as his pulse was weak: “To hell with the perquisites of our young ladies of to-day! Do I say so—or _don’t_ I?” His plans for the morning, which had included a start at that “round and round” stroll in search of four poplars within earshot of the park menagerie, were scrambled as had been his breakfast eggs. Not even the shell of a plan was left. The divine triumvirate was reduced to its original separateness—a blind father over in the East Side yellow brick, a daughter luxuriously ensconced on the avenue, a Western stray-about-town, lonely and alone. And the worst of it was that he could not see just how to right himself; could not blame Jane any more than Irene or himself. Loyalty was a thing to live, not to talk about. After his statements to Jane, both direct and through her father, he looked, in the light of cousinly disclosures, an arrant philanderer—the sort of man who was willing, in Montana sport parlance, “to play both ends against the middle.” The tongue of the bobbed-haired youngling had run according to form. Her belief in her own desirability had put him at a serious disadvantage. He could not follow the cousins, demand a hearing and assert unmanfully that he didn’t love the one who said he did, but did love her who now believed that he did not. Just as a peach was as much the down on its cheek as the pit, the response he craved from Jane must have a delicate, adhering confidence over its heart and soul. If she did not know the one-woman-ness of his feeling for her, then the time had not come to tell her. He wouldn’t have wished to talk her into caring for him, even were he given to verbal suasion. Trust was not a thing to be added afterward. It must be component, delicate, adhering—part of the peach. She did—she must already trust him. But she must have her own time for realization. As for Irene, he’d have to boomerang the extravagant utterances and acts of that perquisitory young admirer back to their source as little like a cad as possible. He felt sure she would not have seized on him had she known the havoc she wrought. She must not be unduly humiliated.