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Miss Valentine had opened her mouth to earnestly disabuse her companion of this erroneous assumption before she realized that he sought with his flummeries to elevate her spirits. “I suppose now you mean to persuade me that I should like to embark upon a tryst,” she observed irritably.
    In point of fact, Jevon would have better preferred no other topic of discourse. No stranger to the addlepated notions that flourished in the fertile minds of the opposite sex, however, he realized that for a conversational gambit of a flirtatious nature, the moment was not propitious. Would the moment ever be? he wondered, as he said: “Oh, no! I will not seek to persuade you. I think that you would like it very well, but you must make up your own mind.”
    How cleverly he managed to tease her and yet at the same time hold himself aloof, thought Sara, frowning at her friend. “I wish you would not mock me!” she retorted, more frankly than she had intended. “I am well aware that I am grown a dowd.”
    Jevon frankly stared. “You a dowd? The devil!” said he.
    “You need not be kind about it.” Sara interpreted her companion’s startled expression as further proof of his good heart. “I have learned to accept that I am left upon the shelf. It is not what I had anticipated for myself, but there is no use crying over spilt milk. Oh, dear! I did not mean to be so plain-spoken! When you talk to me of trysts, it recalls to mind the days before I was obliged to earn my living, when I truly could have engaged in such.”
    “Did you?” he inquired curiously.
    “Did I what?’ Sara echoed, and then again blushed. “Wretch! Naturally I did not! And I beg you will talk to me no more of trysts!”
    “Certainly I won’t, if you wish it.” Jevon reflected that he was fast learning to deal with rebuff. “The subject shall be henceforth taboo—until you introduce it yourself.”
    Pigs would fly sooner, decided Sara, further sunk in gloom. Jevon’s deft extrication of the pair of them from a potentially embarrassing situation had put her, most unreasonably, out of charity with him.
    More aware than was his fair one of the source of her resentment, Jevon longed to invite her to weep out her woes upon his manly chest, following which he would introduce her to rather more pleasurable pursuits. Lest he receive another, even harsher set-down from the object of his affections, he dared not be so bold. Instead he must bide his time until she had grown a trifle more receptive. Perhaps, were the matters plaguing her resolved, she might prove more amenable to romance.
    Chief among those plaguesome matters, decided Jevon, must be his own harum-scarum sibling. Though he had vowed to distance himself in Jaisy’s fits and starts, it grew increasingly obvious that the pursuit of romance required self-sacrifice. Though this too was an unprecedented conclusion—any sacrifice previously involved in his romances had not been required of Jevon—he did not even momentarily hesitate. “You were telling me about Jaisy,” he reminded his silent companion.
    Sara took firmer hold of Confucious, who had been reminded by Jevon’s voice of the keen dislike which he harbored for that source. “I’m sure it’s no wonder I am cross as a cat! Your sister has convinced herself that she has taken Carlin’s fancy to an alarming degree, and that his indifference is assumed. Yes, I know that is moonshine, but she has decided he seeks to whet her interest. As if it needed whetting! Jaisy is practically stalking the poor man.”
    “The deuce you say!” ejaculated Jevon, dismayed by the result of his mischievous impulse. “I should never have indulged the minx by presenting him.”
    “No, you should not have.” Sara was not in the habit of mollycoddling her old friend. “But I daresay if you had not, she would have wheedled someone else into making the introduction! I have tried very hard to keep her from going beyond the line of being pleasing, but it is a