“No wonder I didn’t hear then!” said the girl with a laugh in which it would have taken an acuter ear than McLean’s to detect the secret clamor of chagrin and humiliation.

Of course she had wanted Jack to be safe....  But he might have been ill—­or away on some official summons—­

Just back at his diggings.  Gone off on an impulse, with no thought to let her know....

And she had rushed to McLean with her silly worries and her anxious concern which he had probably taken for a tender interest....

Heaven knows what disillusionizing thing Jack had said to him that day!...  Men were too hateful.

And now McLean had come dutifully to report that the man she was so worried about was quite well and busy, thank you, only he had overlooked any friendship for her, and so had sent no word—­

In Jinny’s ears was the rush of the furies’ wings.  But on Jinny’s lips was a proud little smile, and her bright look was a shining shield for the wounds of the spirit.

“That is a comfort,” she said with pleasant, friendly warmth.  “You don’t know how horridly responsible I felt!  Really, Jack ought to have let me know—­but that’s Jack all over.  He’s never grown up.”

“He’s not had much time,” returned McLean from the height of his twenty-nine years.

“He never will,” said Jinny sagely, “not until—­well, not until he meets some girl, you know, who will make him feel really responsible.”

It occurred unhappily to McLean that the girl Jack had been meeting so assiduously of late had certainly not added to his claims to responsibility!

Steadily he guarded silence.  There are ice fields, on Mont Blanc, where a whisper precipitates an avalanche, and McLean had no intention of starting anything in his friend’s slippery field of affairs.

“I have spent more time,” Miss Jeffries was confiding brightly, for those imperative reasons of her own so obscure to the bewildered young man, “introducing Jack to nice girls—­but it never takes!  Not seriously.  He’s a perfectly dear friend, but he doesn’t care anything really about girls—­and he does need somebody to get him out of his antiquities and his dusty old diggings ...  But of course you think I am a sentimental thing!”

McLean did not tell her what he thought.  He was still fascinatedly engrossed with her revelation of the impeccable Platonic basis of her friendship.  His mood of complicated emotion lightened and brightened and at the same time an amazed wonder unfolded its astonishment.

He marveled at his friend.  To turn to something fantastic, something bizarre—­for so he thought of that veiled girl of the harem—­when he had this Miss Jeffries for a friend—­but probably the young lady herself had never given him the least encouragement.  Women are not easily moved to romance for men they have always regarded as brothers and he could see that her feeling for Jack was the warm, honest, sisterly affection of utter frankness.