"I shall have to go back to England," Jane told herself, as she left the kitchen hot with rage and shame. Master Belknap was for the moment playing peacefully in his sand pile, and Jane, who had been bidden to keep close watch upon his movements, stood looking down at him, winking fast to keep the angry tears from clouding her eyes. One, two, three great sparkling drops got the better of her and fell flashing into the sand; then Jane glanced up to find John Everett looking at her with an expression of poignant anxiety on his honest face. "You are crying," he said in a low voice. "Why? Doesn't my sister----" "Oh, it is nothing! I----" To her immense dismay Jane choked over an unmistakable sob which wrenched her slender throat. "I wish you would--not----" "But I can't help it, when I see you so unhappy. Haven't you any friends in America?" "No-o--that is--I have one," said Jane, remembering Bertha Forbes's unanswered letter. "A man?" he asked, with sudden sharp anxiety. Jane looked at him indignantly. "I don't know any man," she said. "You know me," he murmured. "I should like to be your friend, Jane; may I?" The girl made no reply. Instead she turned and walked steadily toward the house. "I will go back to England," she assured herself a second time. But when at last she had leisure to answer Miss Forbes's letter she found herself refusing her kind offer point blank. "I could not put myself under so great an obligation to you," she wrote. "Besides, I am quite safe and not too unhappy here; and I shall soon have earned the money for my passage." Miss Forbes read this ingenuous epistle with a suspicious lifting of her sagacious brows. "I think I'll try and run over to Staten Island and see what sort of a place she's in," she said aloud. But she forgot this friendly resolution in the rush of the next day's business, and was only recalled to the memory of it by an interview with one of the passengers on the incoming liner. The interview was not of an official nature, and its finish found Miss Forbes nervously chewing her pencil in a state of singular agitation. To search for a person who has ostensibly started upon an indefinite tour of the United States is not unlike the traditional hunt for a needle in a haymow; nevertheless the Hon. Wipplinger Towle had gallantly embarked upon the quest, panoplied with infinite leisure, unlimited money, and the well-disciplined patience of middle age.