“P.S.—­I say nothing of circumstances or of persons; I feel that any comment of mine upon them would be idle.”

Mavering looked up at the sound Boardman made in refolding the letter.  Boardman grinned, with sparkling eyes.  “Pretty neat,” he said.

“Pretty infernally neat,” roared Mavering.

“Do you suppose she means business?”

“Of course she means business.  Why shouldn’t she?”

“I don’t know.  Why should she?”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Boardman.  I suppose I shall have to tell you if I’m going to get any good out of you; but it’s a dose.”  He came away from the window, and swept Boardman’s clothes off the chair preparatory to taking it.

Boardman lifted his head nervously from the pillow.

“Oh; I’ll put them on the bed, if you’re so punctilious!” cried Mavering.

“I don’t mind the clothes,” said Boardman.  “I thought I heard my watch knock on the floor in my vest pocket.  Just take it out, will you, and see if you’ve stopped it?”

“Oh, confound your old Waterbury!  All the world’s stopped; why shouldn’t your watch stop too?” Mavering tugged it out of the pocket, and then shoved it back disdainfully.  “You couldn’t stop that thing with anything short of a sledgehammer; it’s rattling away like a mowing-machine.  You know those Portland women—­those ladies I spent the day with when you were down there at the regatta—­the day I came from Campobello—­Mrs. Frobisher and her sister?” He agglutinated one query to another till he saw a light of intelligence dawn in Boardman’s eye.  “Well, they’re at the bottom of it, I suppose.  I was introduced to them on Class Day, and I ought to have shown them some attention there; but the moment I saw Alice—­Miss Pasmer—­I forgot all about ’em.  But they didn’t seem to have noticed it much, and I made it all right with ’em that day at Portland; and they came up in the fall, and I made an appointment with them to drive out to Cambridge and show them the place.  They were to take me up at the Art Museum; but that was the day I met Miss Pasmer, and I—­I forgot about those women again.”

Boardman was one of those who seldom laugh; but his grin expressed all the malicious enjoyment he felt.  He said nothing in the impressive silence which Mavering let follow at this point.

“Oh, you think it was funny?” cried Mavering.  “I thought it was funny too; but Alice herself opened my eyes to what I’d done, and I always intended to make it all right with them when I got the chance.  I supposed she wished me too.”

Boardman grinned afresh.

“She told me I must; though she seemed to dislike my having been with them the day after she’d thrown me over.  But if”—­Mavering interrupted himself to say, as the grin widened on Boardman’s face—­“if you think it was any case of vulgar jealousy, you’re very much mistaken, Boardman.  She isn’t capable of it, and she was so magnanimous about it that I made up my mind to do all I could to retrieve myself.  I felt that it was my duty to her.  Well, last night at Mrs. Jim Bellingham’s reception—­”