That next Sunday, as I drank my tea, I interrogated my wife. "How is this Sunday different from all other Sundays, little woman? What has happened? Have you altered the curtains, or rearranged the furniture, or where is the indefinable difference of it? Are you wearing your hair in a new way without warning me? I clearly perceive a change in my environment, and I cannot for the life of me say what it is." Then my wife answered in her most tragic voice: "George," she said, "that--that William has not come near the place to-day! And Jane is crying her heart out upstairs." There followed a period of silence. Jane, as I have said, stopped singing about the house, and began to care for our brittle possessions, which struck my wife as being a very sad sign indeed. The next Sunday, and the next, Jane asked to go out, "to walk with William," and my wife, who never attempts to extort confidences, gave her permission, and asked no questions. On each occasion Jane came back looking flushed and very determined. At last one day she became communicative. "William is being led away," she remarked abruptly, with a catching of the breath, apropos of tablecloths. "Yes, m'm. She is a milliner, and she can play on the piano." "I thought," said my wife, "that you went out with him on Sunday." "Not out with him, m'm--after him. I walked along by the side of them, and told her he was engaged to me." "Dear me, Jane, did you? What did they do?" "Took no more notice of me than if I was dirt. So I told her she should suffer for it." "It could not have been a very agreeable walk, Jane." "Not for no parties, ma'am. "I wish," said Jane, "I could play the piano, ma'am. But anyhow, I don't mean to let _her_ get him away from me. She's older than him, and her hair ain't gold to the roots, ma'am." It was on the August Bank Holiday that the crisis came. We do not clearly know the details of the fray, but only such fragments as poor Jane let fall. She came home dusty, excited, and with her heart hot within her. The milliner's mother, the milliner, and William had made a party to the Art Museum at South Kensington, I think. Anyhow, Jane had calmly but firmly accosted them somewhere in the streets, and asserted her right to what, in spite of the consensus of literature, she held to be her inalienable property. She did, I think, go so far as to lay hands on him. They dealt with her in a crushingly superior way. They "called a cab." There was a "scene," William being pulled away into the four-wheeler by his future wife and mother-in-law from the reluctant hands of our discarded Jane. There were threats of giving her "in charge." "My poor Jane!" said my wife, mincing veal as though she was mincing William. "It's a shame of them. I would think no more of him. He is not worthy of you." "No, m'm," said Jane. "He _is_ weak."