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“I am coming home,” it announced, “I am coming home, and I’m going to be married.”

And the simple little words, waited for so long, remembered so clearly, and coming, at last, so late, did what all Jimmie’s more eloquent pleadings had failed to do.

Sylvia Knowles, a creature made of vanities, realized that she loved better than all her other vanities her place in this one man’s regard. No contemplation of Mr. Stevenson’s estate on the Hudson, his shooting lodge on a Scottish moor, his English abbey, and his Italian villa could nerve her for the first meeting with Jimmie, could fortify her against his first laughing repetition:

” You married to Gilbert Stevenson,” or his later scornful, “You married to Gilbert Stevenson.”

So she dismissed Mr. Stevenson with as little feeling as she had annexed him, and sought comfort in the knowledge that her mother was furious, her own fortune ample, and that marrying for love was a graceful, becoming pose and an unusual thing to do.

Her rejected suitor bore his disappointment as correctly as he had borne his joy. He stormed the special center of philanthropy in which old Marvin’s little girl had buried herself, and she was most incorrectly but refreshingly glad to see him. She destroyed forever his poise and his pride in it when she sat upon his unaccustomed knee, rested her tired head upon his immaculate shirt front, and wept for very happiness.

* * * * *

“And I remember,” said Miss Knowles, “that you always take cream.”

“Nothing, thank you,” Jimmie corrected. “Just plain unadulterated tea. I learned to like it in Japan. But don’t bother about it. I haven’t long to stay. I came in to tell you–“

“That you’re going to be married.”

“How did you guess?”

“You didn’t leave me to guess. Your telegram.”

“Ah, yes!” quoth Jimmie. “I sent a lot of them before I sailed. But in my letters–“

“You mentioned absolutely nothing but that stupid old Drewitt affair. Never a word of the places you saw, the people you met, or even the people you missed. Nothing of the customs, the girls, the clothes. Nothing but that shuffling old Drewitt and his stuffy old wife. Nothing about yourself.”

“Orders are orders,” quoth Jimmie, “and those were yours to me. I remember exactly how it came about. We had been talking personalities. I have an idea that I made rather a fool of myself, and that you told me so. Then you, wisely conjecturing that I might write as foolishly as I had talked, made out a list of subjects for my letters. My name, I noted with some care, was not upon that list.”

“Jimmie,” said Miss Knowles, “I was cruel and heartless that day. I’ve thought about it often.”

“You’ve thought!” cried the genial Jimmie. “How had you time to think? Where were all those ‘anothers’?”

“There were none,” lied Miss Knowles soulfully with a disdainful backward glance toward Mr. Stevenson. “For a time I thought there was one. But whenever I thought of that last talk of ours–you remember it, don’t you?”

“Of course. I told you I was going to be married as soon as I came home. Well, and so I am.”

“So you are. But I used to think that if you hesitated to tell me; if you felt that I might still be hard about it and unsympathetic; if you decided to confide no more in me–“

“But you would be sure to know. Even if I had not telegraphed I never could have kept it a secret from you.”

“Not easily. I should have been, as you observe, sure to know. Do you remember how I always refused to believe you? It was not until you were in that horrid Japan, where all the women are supposed to be beautiful–“