Sometimes, as she sat alone in her room, mending her stockings or taking
timely stitches in the fingers of her gloves, she would further fortify
herself by humming a scrap from the refrain of a song she had once heard
at a concert. "_Toujours fidele_," she would moan in a deep contralto
voice, as she drew her needle slowly in and out; "_toujours fidele_." She
paused lingeringly on the second syllable of _toujours_ and on the
middle syllable of _fidele_, and repeated the phrase over and over again
at short intervals--that was all of the song that she knew. And after she
had chanted it a dozen times or so, her heart would soften and her eyes
would overflow, and she would have to pause in her work. Then she would
look at her brimming eyes in the glass, and wonder how she could ever
have had a thought for any other man than Theodore.
While poor Brower would sit at his desk and bemoan the fate that
compelled him to insure houses instead of building them. He had waited
until thirty-five for his first affair, and he was foredoomed to take it
has hard as a man may.
"Yes," pursued Jane, "you thought you would come and see whether they
were building us upside down or hindside before, I suppose."
"Everything looks all right," said Bingham, serenely. "The foreman can be
trusted, I imagine. What's that you've got in your hand?"
Jane held out a battered horseshoe, to which a few twisted nails were
still clinging. "I picked it up a minute ago.
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