“Not in my line,” said Jan, swaying himself about on the bough.

“Isn’t it!  I should say it was.  Why don’t you invite Sibylla to your house, if you are so fond of her?”

“She won’t come,” said Jan.

“Perhaps you have not asked her!”

“I was beginning to ask her, but she flew at me and ordered me to hold my tongue.  No, I see it,” Jan added, in self-soliloquy, “she’ll never come there.  I thought she might:  and I got Miss Deb to think so.  She’ll—­she’ll—­”

“She’ll what?” asked John Massingbird.

“She’ll be a thorn in Lionel’s side, I’m afraid.”

“Nothing more likely,” acquiesced easy John.  “Roses and thorns go together.  If gentlemen will marry the one, they must expect to get their share of the other.”

Jan jumped off his bough.  His projects all appeared to be failing.  The more he had dwelt upon his suddenly-thought-of scheme, that Dr. West’s house might afford an asylum for Lionel and his wife, the more he had become impressed with its desirability.  Jan Verner, though the most unselfish, perhaps it may be said the most improvident of mortals, with regard to himself, had a considerable amount of forethought for the rest of the world.  It had struck him, even before it struck Lionel, that, if turned out of Verner’s Pride, Lionel would want a home; want it in the broadest acceptation of the word.  It would have been Jan’s delight to give him one.  He, Jan, went home, told Miss Deb the news that it was John Massingbird who had returned, not Frederick, and imparted his views of future arrangements.

Miss Deb was dubious.  For Mr. Verner of Verner’s Pride to become an inmate of their home, dependent on her housekeeping, looked a formidable affair.  But Jan pointed out that, Verner’s Pride gone, it appeared to be but a choice of cheap lodgings; their house would be an improvement upon that.  And Miss Deb acquiesced; and grew to contemplate the addition to her family, in conjunction with the addition Jan proposed to add to her income, with great satisfaction.

That failed.  Failed upon Jan’s first hint of it to Mrs. Verner.  She—­to use his own expression—­flew out at him, at the bare hint; and Sibylla Verner could fly out in an unseemly manner when she chose.

Jan’s next venture had been with John Massingbird.  That was failure the second.  “Where are they to go?” thought Jan.

It was a question that Lionel Verner may also have been asking in his inmost heart.  As yet he could not look his situation fully in the face.  Not from any want of moral courage, but because of the inextricable confusion that his affairs seemed to be in.  And, let his moral courage be what it would, the aspect they bore might have caused a more hardy heart than Lionel’s to shrink. How much he owed he could not tell; nothing but debt stared him in the face.  He had looked to the autumn rents of Verner’s Pride to extricate him from