Rose meant nothing disparaging to Jimmie’s suit. She did think Tom, with his thirty-two years, better suited to Annie, who had been a wife, than saucy-faced teasing Jimmie of only twenty-four. But love never consults the suitability of a thing, and Jimmie was desperately in love by this time. It was not possible for one of his temperament to live a whole month with Annie as he had lived, and not be in love with her. Her graceful beauty, brightened by the auxiliaries of dress and improved health, and the thousand little attentions she paid him just because he was a soldier, had finished the work begun when he was home before, and he could not go back without hearing from her own lips whether there was any hope for him,—the scamp, the scapegrace, the rebel, as he had been called by turns. What Rose said of Tom brought a shadow to his face, and as he walked rapidly toward Widow Simms’, not limping now, or scarcely touching his cane to the ground, he thought of Tom,—_old Tom_ he called him,—wondering how much he had been interested in Annie Graham, and asking himself if it were just the thing for him to take advantage of Tom’s absence, and supplant him in the affections of one whom he might, perhaps, have won had he an opportunity. “But Tom has had his day,” Jimmie thought. “He can’t expect another wife as nice as Mary was, and it is only fair for me to try my luck. _I_ never loved any one before.” Jimmie stopped suddenly here; stopped in his soliloquy and his walk, and looking up into the starry sky, thought of the boy at New London, and the hills beyond, and the hotel on the beach, and the white-robed little figure with the blue ribbons in the golden hair, and the soft light in the violet eyes, which used to watch for his coming, and look so bright and yet so modest withal when he came. _Louise_ her aunt had called her, and he had designated her as _Lu_, or _Lulu_, just as the fancy took him. “I _did_ love _her_ some,” Jimmie thought. “Yes, I loved her as well as a boy of seventeen is capable of loving, and I deceived her shabbily. I wonder where she is? She must be twenty or more by this time, and a woman much like Annie. If I could find her, who knows that I might not like her best?” And for a moment Jimmie revolved the propriety of leaving Annie to Tom, while he sought for his first love of the Pequot House. But Annie Graham had made too strong an impression upon him to be given up for a former love, who might be dead for aught he knew, and so Tom was cast overboard, and Jimmie resumed his walk in the direction of Widow Simms’ cottage.