Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/200

190 at his window and asked for a return to Belleair.

"One thirty-five," said Fulke Jarvis, mechanically. Miss Hasbrouck laid down a ten-dollar bill and smiled frankly at him.

"Why don't you come and see me?" she asked.

Fulke pushed out the tickets. "I'd like to, of course," he said, blushing.

"I'll be back by Monday. But any evening that you like."

After she was gone Jarvis suddenly snatched up the ten-dollar bill and gazed at it blankly.

"I never gave her her change," he muttered under his breath. "Must have looked like a rake-off to the unprejudiced eye. Let me see; she'll be back by Monday, and I'll step around and return it then."

But when Monday came Mr. Jarvis found himself unable to carry out his laudable intention of restoring to Miss Hasbrouck her property. He debated the question so long with himself that he finally found it too late to make the attempt. "Tuesday, then," he said, resolutely, as he went up-stairs to bed.

Curiously enough, our hero passed through precisely the same experience on the succeeding Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights, and the money continued to remain in his possession. On Friday it suddenly occurred to him that Miss Hasbrouck might be justified in concluding him capable of misappropriating the wretched stuff; the thought made him turn cold.

"How do you do, Mr. Jarvis?" and Miss Hasbrouck stood regarding him with mild reproach. "I certainly expected you this week, and you never came near me. What's that? My change! I don't understand."

Mr. Jarvis hurriedly explained the oversight of the week before, provided the young lady, at her request, with a single to Riverton, and made a positive engagement to call the next Thursday evening—all this in half a minute or less, for there was a long queue of impatient suburbanites in waiting.

Half an hour later Fulke Jarvis made a disquieting discovery. Not only had he forgotten, after all, to offer satisfaction for the original wrong, but here was a second ten-dollar bill, that had been evidently tendered in payment for the fifty-cent ticket to Riverton. "I never saw such an unbusinesslike woman," he remarked with some heat. "I wonder what she thinks of me."

That next Thursday evening Mr. Jarvis settled the situation, at least so far as concerned himself. After walking three times around the block in which Miss Hasbrouck lived, he went to his club and sent the money around by messenger, together with a carefully worded note, in which he regretted the broken engagement, but made no excuse for it. "That ends it," said Jarvis, dismally, as he sat over a black cigar in the darkest corner of that vast and empty hall of silence yclept the club library. But in this he was mistaken.

"I'll get the tickets for the party," said young Buller, sweetly. "Let me see—six and two make eight, and it's one thirty-five to Belleair, isn't it, old chap?"

They were all there—Mrs. Maxon and Jerrold and Maltby, Miss Lansing, and Eve Hasbrouck standing a little in the rear. On their way to the Country Club, no doubt, and for an instant Fulke Jarvis was conscious of an unmistakable pang of envy and regret.

"Thank you, Mr. Buller," began Mrs. Maxon; but Miss Lansing interrupted her remorselessly.

"Not to be thought of for a moment, my dear; the strain upon his intellect might be fatal. Be quiet, 'Bully'; you know that you never could count above five; I call your golf scores to witness. Eight returns, if you please, Mr. Jarvis."

Miss Hasbrouck lingered for a moment as the party moved on towards the train gates. "You haven't been to see me yet," she said. "But some day—"

"No," interrupted Mr. Jarvis. He looked straight before him, and the lines about his mouth grew deeper. "No," he said again.

"Oh yes, you will," returned Miss Hasbrouck, with cheerful decisiveness. "It invariably happens so with two negatives. Au revoir."

At the end of a fortnight Fulke Jarvis gave in. He went to Miss Hasbrouck's house and asked for her. It was an opera