As I knew that the meeting of the brothers Jacobus was the subject
of excited comment in the whole of the sugary Pearl of the Ocean I
wanted to know why I was blamed.

"I have been the occasion of a move which may end in a
reconciliation surely desirable from the point of view of the
proprieties--don't you know?"

"Of course, if that girl were disposed of it would certainly
facilitate--" he mused sagely, then, inconsequential creature, gave
me a light tap on the lower part of my waistcoat. "You old
sinner," he cried jovially, "much you care for proprieties. But
you had better look out for yourself, you know, with a personage
like Jacobus who has no sort of reputation to lose."

He had recovered his gravity of a respectable citizen by that time
and added regretfully:

"All the women of our family are perfectly scandalised."

But by that time I had given up visiting the S- family and the D-
family. The elder ladies pulled such faces when I showed myself,
and the multitude of related young ladies received me with such a
variety of looks: wondering, awed, mocking (except Miss Mary, who
spoke to me and looked at me with hushed, pained compassion as
though I had been ill), that I had no difficulty in giving them all
up. I would have given up the society of the whole town, for the
sake of sitting near that girl, snarling and superb and barely clad
in that flimsy, dingy, amber wrapper, open low at the throat. She
looked, with the wild wisps of hair hanging down her tense face, as