He would laugh sometimes at her
pretensions, just as he would have laughed at similar self-
assertiveness on the part of any one else with whom he must
necessarily be thrown, but never by thought, word or deed had he
ever given my Lady Wren the faintest suspicion that he considered
her more beautiful, better dressed, or more entertaining, either
in song, chirp, flight or plumage, than the flock of other birds
about her. Indeed, the Scribe knows it to be a fact that if Jack's
innate politeness had not forbidden, he would many times have told
her truths, some of them mighty unpleasant ones, to which her ears
had been strangers since her school-girl days.
This unstudied treatment, strange to say--the result really, of
the boy's indifference--had of late absorbed her. What she could
not have she generally longed for, and there was not the slightest
question up to the present moment that Jack was still afield.
Again the girl pressed the button of the cord within reach of her
hand, and for the third time Hortense entered.
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