“Oh!  Jack!  I ought to have waited:  I know it.  You have been so good to me”

“I’ve been good to myself, being with you,” he returned tenderly.  “But I almost wish you had told me over the telephone.  You would never have known how I felt, and it would have been better all around”

He bent toward me, and crushed both my hands in his, looking into my face with a gaze that was in itself a caress.

“Now you must go home, little girl, back to—­your—­husband.”  The words came slowly.

“When shall I see you again, Jack?” I knew the answer even before it came.

“When you need me, dear girl, if you ever do,” he replied.  “I can’t be near you without loving you and hating your husband, whoever he may be, and that is a dangerous state of affairs.  But, wherever I am, a note or a wire to the Hotel Alfred will be forwarded to me, and, if the impossible should happen and your husband ever fail you, remember, Jack is waiting, ready to do anything for you.”

My tears were falling fast now.  Jack laid his hand upon my shoulder.

“Come, Margaret, you must control yourself,” he said in his old brotherly voice.  “I want you to tell me your new name and address.  I’m never going to lose track of you, remember that.  You won’t see me, but your big brother will be on the job just the same.”

I told him, and he wrote it carefully down in his note-book.  Then he looked at me fixedly.

“You would better put your engagement and wedding rings back on,” he said.  “Of course I realize now that you must have taken them off when you removed your gloves in the restaurant, with the thought that you did not want to spoil my dinner by telling me of your marriage.  But you must have them on when you meet your husband, you know.”

How like Jack, putting aside his own suffering to be sure of my welfare.  I put my hand in my muff, drew out my mesh bag and opened it.

“Jack!” I gasped, horror-stricken, “my rings are gone!”

“Impossible!” His face was white.  He snatched my mesh bag from my grasp.  “Where did you put them?  In here?”

Jack turned the mesh bag inside out.  A handkerchief, a small coin purse, two or three bills of small denominations, an envelope with a tiny powder puff—­these were all.

“Are you sure you put them in here?”

“Yes.”  I could hardly articulate the word, I was so frightened.

“Have you opened your bag since?”

I thought a moment.  Had I?  Then a rush of remembrance came to me.

“I took out a handkerchief when I cried in the restaurant.”

“You must have drawn them out then, and either dropped them there, or they may have been caught in the handkerchief and dropped in the taxi.”  We searched without success and Jack’s face darkened as he ordered the chauffeur to speed back to Broquin’s.  “We must hurry, dear.  This is awful.  If you have lost those rings, your husband will have a right to be angry.”