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I noticed Ellis staring and staring at that jacket….

I needn’t tell you. You can see a mile off what had happened.

Ellis said in his casual way:

“Hello! Where did you pick up that affair, Miss Smith?” Meaning the jacket.

She said she had picked it up on one of the landings, and that there was a pair of continuations lying in a broken bonnet-box just close to it, and that the continuations were ruined by too much water.

I could feel myself blushing redder and redder.

“In a bonnet-box, eh?” said Master Ellis.

Then he said: “Would you mind letting me look at the right-hand breast-pocket of that jacket?”

She didn’t mind in the least. He looked at the strip of white linen that your men’s tailors always stitch into that pocket with your name and address and date, and age and weight, and I don’t know what.

He said, “Thank you.”

And she asked him if the jacket was his.

“Yes,” he said, “but I hope you’ll keep it.”

Everybody said what a very curious coincidence! Ellis avoided my eyes, and I avoided his…. Will you believe me that when we “had it out” afterwards, he and I, that boy was seriously angry. He suspected me of a plan “to make the best of him” during the stay with the Smiths, and he very strongly objected to being “made the best of.” His notion apparently was that even his worst was easily good enough for my Colonial friends, although, as he’d have said, they had “simply wiped the floor with him” in the billiard-room. Anyhow, he was furious. He actually used the word “unwarrantable,” and it was rather a long word for a mere stripling of a nephew to use to an auntie who was paying all his expenses. However, he’s a nice enough boy at the bottom, and soon got down off his high horse. I must tell you that Nellie Smith wore that jacket all day, quite without any concern. These Colonials don’t really seem to mind what they wear. At any rate she didn’t. She was just as much at ease in that jacket as she had been in her gorgeousness the evening before. And she and Ellis were walking about together all day. The next day of course we all left. We couldn’t stay, seeing the state we were in…. Now, don’t you think it’s a very curious story?

Thus spake Mrs Ellis across the tea-table in an alcove at the Hanover.

“But you’ve not finished the story!” I explained.

“Yes, I have,” she said.

“You haven’t explained what you were doing at my tailor’s in Sackville Street.”

“Oh!” she cried, “I was forgetting that. Well, I promised Ellis a new suit. And as I wanted to show him that after all I had larger ideas about tailoring than he had, I told him I knew a very good tailor’s in Sackville Street–a real West End tailor–and that if he liked he could have his presentation suit made there. He pooh-poohed the offer at first, and pretended that his Bursley tailor was just as good as any of your West End tailors. But at last he accepted. You see–it meant an authorized visit to London…. I’d been into the tailor’s just now to pay the bill. That’s all.”

“But even now,” I said, “you haven’t finished the story.”

“Yes, I have,” she replied again.

“What about Nellie Smith?” I demanded. “A story about a handsome girl named Nellie, who could make a break of twenty-eight at billiards, and a handsome dog like Ellis Carter, and a fire, and the girl wearing the youth’s jacket–it can’t break off like that.”

“Look here,” she said, leaning a little across the table. “Did you expect them to fall in love with each other on the spot and be engaged? What a sentimental old thing you are, after all!”

“But haven’t they seen each other since?”

“Oh yes! In London, and in Bursley too.”

“And haven’t they–“

“Not yet…. They may or they mayn’t. You must remember this isn’t the reign of Queen Victoria…. If they do, I’ll let you know.”