She gave another look at her corner-stone. "Well, what do they do after the last sad rites? They go home, don't they? Yes; let's go home." "Suppose I drive you down? I'm going your way." "I _have_ got a nickel, somewhere," said Jane, "and I was going back on the elevated, for a change; but--well, all right." And she let him help her into the buggy. "Monstrous big house, isn't it?" she commented, as she overlooked the foundations from this loftier point. "I don't know how we are ever going to fill it." "Oh yes, you will," said Bingham, gathering up the lines. "Your father and mother, and your brother and Rosy..." "I don't know as to Truesdale; he's such a fly-about. You can't depend very much on him. And I don't feel any too sure about Rosy, either," she added, inwardly. Her state of uncertainty about Rosy was shared, in fact, by all the rest of the family; it looked decidedly as if the youngest daughter were to leave the shelter of her father's roof before the completion of her first year in the world. She was a maiden choosing, and the absorbing question was--which? On the side of William Bates there was his position, his ability, his certain future, and the sentimental resumption of old family relations. On the side of Paston there was an entertaining personality and the paragraph in Debrett. The two met occasionally in the Marshalls' front parlor, and sat each other out with much civility and pertinacity--Bates somewhat firm and severe, Paston extremely gay and diverting. Jane and her mother lingered in the _coulisses_ and even ventured a word now and then with the _ingénue_ after she had left the boards. But the more the family found to say directly and indirectly on behalf of William Bates, the more resolutely Rosamund turned her face in the opposite direction. "You can't influence Rosy," said Jane; "she'll have her own way--that's a point there needn't be any doubt on. And that boudoir of hers in the new house may come around to me, after all, unless I--" Jane flushed vividly as she thus cast her own horoscope. Bingham at this moment drew the buggy up alongside the curb in front of the old house. A young man on the sidewalk was just approaching the front gate. "Dear me!" gasped Jane, inwardly, "what a miserable sinner I am!" Her heart sank and her appetite left her. The young man was Theodore Brower; she had invited him to dinner and had forgotten all about it. XVII "Well, those are my views," said Belden. He elevated his eyebrows slightly as he dropped his glance to a row of shapely nails that lay closely together on the thick of his thumb, and an imperceptible smile moved slowly under the cover of his thick mustache. "To right completely such a wrong as this there is only one course that _I_ know of."