Oliver glanced over his shoulder at Jane. Their eyes met and their gaze held for some seconds. He detected the clouded, troubled look in hers and was suddenly conscious of what must have seemed to her a serious intensity in his own. Without a word, he left Mrs. Sage and went to Jane. “Don’t worry,” he said to her in a low tone. “You couldn’t have said anything to Malone that—” “It isn’t that,” she interrupted nervously. “It is the feeling that we are all being spied upon.” She hesitated a moment. “I remember one thing. He asked me what kind of a night it was.” “Well, there wasn’t any harm in telling him, was there?” he chided. “That is, if you remembered.” “I do remember. He said that some one had told him it was a rainy, stormy night. I assured him he had been misinformed—that it hadn’t rained for weeks. He—he seemed surprised.” “Well, what of that?” Her wide-set gray eyes wavered. They steadied instantly, however, and she smiled—a confident, disarming smile. “I suppose it’s the finding out that he was a detective and that he was pumping me,” she explained. “Anyhow, you are smiling again,” he half whispered, “and that makes me want to sing and dance for joy.” He was once more aware that his voice was throaty and unsteady. A faint wave of color spread to her cheek and brow, but she did not look away. When she spoke again it was at the conclusion of a long, deep exhalation; the sentence ended in a fluttering, breathless murmur. “Don’t you think mother is perfectly wonderful, Oliver?” He nodded. He felt that he could not trust his voice. He knew now that he was in love—that he always had been in love with Jane, that he always would be in love with her. He compressed his lips and fought against the strange, mad impulse to shout that he was in love with her, that she was his—all his—and that no man should take her away from him. And she? She was thinking of that dry, hot night when he came to see her after leaving his father, out of breath, his shoes covered with fresh black mud. There had been no rain for weeks. The roads were thick with dust. And Lansing too had noticed that his shoes were muddy. He had spoken to her about them, he had wondered where Oliver had been to get into mud up to his shoe tops! And she, herself, had never ceased to wonder. Mr. Sage was speaking to Mrs. Sammy. “Yes, my dear Muriel, I can’t quite believe I am awake. It all seems like a dream.” His wife not only overheard this remark but obviously the one that led up to it. “Oh, I say, old dear,” she exclaimed, “you must get over the notion that you are asleep. It’s not complimentary to me to have you going about everywhere pinching yourself to see whether you’re awake or not. And the worst of it is, he pinches me every now and then to see whether I am flesh and blood or merely a hallucination.” Sammy cleared his throat gallantly. “Permit me to say, Miss Judge, that you _are_ a dream, and if I was Mr. Sage I’d _never_ wake up.”