"Where are--we going?" she asked him, and the little catch in her soft voice raised John Everett to a seventh heaven of unreasoning happiness. "How would you like," he asked, "to let this train carry us the entire length of Manhattan Island--which is really the live heart of New York, you know--and bring up at Bronx Park? I was there once with Buster, and there are all sorts of queer birds and reptiles and animals to be seen, and a pretty winding river--we'll go up it in a rowboat, if you like the water; and we'll have our lunch in a little restaurant by the rocking stone, and then----" "But--I'm obliged to be at home by five o'clock," she told him with a transient clouding of her bright eyes, "and--and I am afraid that Mrs. Belknap----" "Jane," he began, in a low, persuasive voice, "just listen to me for a minute. You must have a reasonably independent character or you wouldn't be here in America. You remember what you told me the other day of how you came to leave your home in England; now that being the case, suppose you make up your mind to forget all about my excellent sister and her claims on you for just this one day and be yourself. Will you, Jane? It will be a lot more fun for both of us, and it won't hurt anybody in the world." Jane drew a quick breath. "I'd like to," she said honestly. At that very moment Mrs. Belknap, becomingly veiled and gowned and leaning back complacently against the luxurious cushions of Mrs. Sloan's new automobile, was saying to her hostess: "Oh, thank you so much for thinking to inquire after my brother! Yes, John is spending the day at the country club; he used to be a champion golf player--did you know it? and he enjoys a day on the links beyond anything." Then this sapient young matron permitted the carking cares of everyday life to trail away into the dust-laden distance with the mellow honking of the great horn--an experiment which Jane and John Everett were also trying to their mutual satisfaction on the sun-lit reaches of the Bronx River. The boat which they hired at a rickety little landing stage was an unwieldy flat-iron shaped scow, designed with an eye to the safety of the inexperienced public as well as the profit of the owner; but Jane, bright-eyed and pink cheeked, seated in the big square stern, was not too far away from John on the rower's seat, and the unwieldy craft presently carried the two of them around a wooded bend, out of sight of a group of roystering picnickers on the bank, into a quiet nook where the tall trees looked down at their reflection in the lazily flowing water. "It reminds me," said Jane with a sigh, "of England; there is a river like this near Uncle Robert's place in Kent, only it isn't muddy like this."