Jane reflected upon this eminently sane proposition over night; then she faced her new-found friend and advisor with a pale but determined face. "Thank you for offering to pay my passage back to England," she said, "but I really can't accept it. I couldn't face Aunt Agatha and Gwendolen and--and the others. I'd rather scrub floors than to do that! Perhaps I'll have to scrub in the end, for my money is almost gone." Bertha Forbes stared at the girl speculatively. "If you will tell them at the employment agency that you're willing to do house work, you'll soon find a place," she said; "there are plenty of people who will hire you to work in their houses, and ask few questions about your past. But it's no fun to scrub floors, my young friend, unless the floors happen to be your own. I never tried _that_ myself; but I've seen deluded young women who seemed to think it a vastly agreeable pastime, if there was only a young man in the case." And this is how it came about that Miss Jane Evelyn Aubrey-Blythe--just two weeks from the time she informed the invisible forces of the universe that things would have to change--found herself humbly seeking entrance at the side door of a modest, detached villa, situated in a modest, detached suburb of New York. "Things" had changed, indeed! CHAPTER VII There was, apparently, no one at home in the modest detached villa; for, although Jane could hear the trill of the electric bell within, the door remained fast shut. After a discreet interval she ventured to sit down for a minute's rest on a little green bench set beneath the budding vines. Then she drew a deep breath. It was very quiet, and the air blowing over wide expanses of vacant lots was sweet and warm. Dandelions were in bloom amid the green April grass, and an American robin sang loudly in a tall elm near the front gate. Jane looked about her with a homesick flutter of her sore heart. The raw suburb, with its muddy road, its hastily constructed sidewalks, its ornate houses with their protruding balconies, bay-windows and hideous roof lines, broken by extraneous ornamental railings and dormer windows of no known style of architecture, offended eyes accustomed to the garden trimness and ordered beauty of England. Bertha Forbes's parting advice recurred to her mind with an added touch of poignancy: "It may not be pleasant to be snubbed by one's rich relations; but it's better than some other things I know of." Jane wondered--for a fleeting minute--if she had made a fool of herself. If, after all, she would not better have endured accustomed woes than to fly to ills she knew not of. But such tardy reflections were speedily ended by the sound of voices and footsteps from the rear. Jane rose hastily to her feet just in time to behold a tall, broad-shouldered young man appear around the corner of the veranda at an ambling trot, while a small boy of two or three plied a switch about his heels and jerked the scarlet lines attached to his person.