But, then, Bob couldn’t let her alone. He himself would have argued that you might as well ask a man to let a hand or a foot alone while it is aching. At the minute when Jennie was thinking these thoughts as she flitted about the house, he was seated at an open hotel window on the Santa Thereza hill above Rio de Janeiro, looking down on an iridescent city creeping round the foam-fringed edges of a turquoise sea, and saying to himself: "I’m watching over you, Jennie. I’m here, but my love is there and fills all the space between us. I came away and left you exposed to all sorts of trouble. I shouldn’t have done that; I’m sorry now I did. I thought that if we were married the rest would take care of itself; but I see now it couldn’t. You’re having a harder time than I ever supposed you’d have, and you’re having it all alone; but my love is with you, Jennie, and the worst can’t happen while it protects you. Dangers will threaten you, but you’ll go to meet them with my love closing you in, and something will ward them off." "I wish he’d stop thinking about me like that." Jennie’s reference, while she stood at the mirror putting the last touches to her costume, was to this same thought as expressed in the letters she received from South America. Its appeal to her imagination was such as to create an atmosphere wrapping her about as a halo wraps a saint. She couldn’t get away from it. In going to meet Hubert, as she would do in a few minutes, it would go with her, an embarrassing witness of the sin against itself. For the minute, the action of her mind was twofold. She was making this protest as to Bob and was also giving minute attention to her dress. Not only was it her first appearance in public since her father’s funeral but it was a moment at which the victim must be neatly decked for the altar. Having no money to spend on "mourning," she had put deft touches of black on a last year’s white summer suit, to which a black hat thrown together by Gussie, with the black shoes and stockings already in her possession, added their mute witness that she was grieving for a relative. Having, moreover, the native _chic_ which counts for most in the art of dressing, she was one more instance of the girl of the humbler walks in life who, by some secret of her own, confounds the product of the Rue de la Paix. She was to leave for the studio as soon as her mother got up from her early-afternoon rest. The early-afternoon rest had become a necessity for Lizzie ever since the day when Josiah had been laid away. "You’ll call me if Teddy rings," she had stipulated, before lying down, and Jennie had promised faithfully.