He looked helplessly about the room for an instant; no, there was nothing else for it. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I must be going.” He shook hands with Alice, bowed to Mrs. Sponley, and then looked hard at Dick. But she returned his unspoken message with only a nod of farewell. “Come again, as soon as you can,” she said. Jack strode down the front steps, for once in his life thoroughly angry. Whatever Dick might think of him, however tired she might be of having him tell her that he loved her, he at least deserved a hearing. He knew that she could have escaped from the library; that just now she might easily have excused herself and followed him into the hall, as she had done a dozen times before. She had chosen that way of telling him that she did not wish him to finish what he had begun to tell her; what he had kept himself from telling her all these last six months. So through the still pouring rain, up this street and down that, without rain-coat or umbrella, splashed Jack Dorlin, angry, miserable, promising himself a vengeance, and calling himself a cad for thinking of such a thing; making new resolves, good and bad, at every street corner, and rejoicing only in the water which drained from the brim of his straw hat and drenched his thin-clad shoulders. Truly it is a madness, though not confined to midsummer. CHAPTER XI COMMON HONESTY In the library the two men watched the door until it clicked shut behind those who were going into the drawing-room to hear Jack Dorlin play. Then, after adjusting his easy-chair so that the light would not fall on his face, John Bagsbury seated himself. “I’m tired to-night. This has been a big day. You say you have some business to talk over. It’s against your rule, isn’t it, to talk business after dinner?” Sponley nodded. “This is rather important; and I couldn’t be sure of catching you the first thing in the morning, so I broke over, for once. “I came around,” he continued, “to ask you what you mean to do with Pickering?” If John had any movement at all, it was like that of a man who had just lighted a good cigar,--a relaxing of the muscles, a sinking somewhat deeper into the big arm-chair. Sponley glanced at him, expecting a reply, but it was near a minute before John spoke. “Why do you want to know? I mean, in what capacity do you ask me?” “Why--as a director in Bagsbury and Company’s Savings Bank, I suppose,” said Sponley, tolerantly. “I have said nothing to my directors about any business dealings with Pickering.” The words were not said brusquely; they were the simple statement of a fact. “Exactly, and therefore one of your directors is compelled to come and ask you about it in order to find out.” “And as I have said nothing,” John continued more slowly, “it is a fair inference that I have nothing to say.”