David Cable lost no time in hurrying away from Chicago with his wife and Jane. They were whisked westward in his private car on the second day after the Bansemer exposure. Broken-spirited, Jane acquiesced in all their plans; she seemed as one in a stupor, comprehending, yet unresponsive to the pain that enveloped her.
"I can't see anyone that I know here," she said listlessly. "Oh, the thought of what they are saying!"
They did not tell her that Graydon had enlisted as a private soldier in the United States Army; Jane only knew that she loved him and that the bar sinister existed.
Cable's devotion to her was beautiful. He could not have been more tender had she been his own daughter, instead of his wife's imposition.
Jane was ill in Pasadena for many weeks. Her depressed condition made her recovery doubtful. It was plain to two persons, at least, that she did not care whether she lived or died. The physicians were puzzled, but no explanation was offered by the Cables. It was not until certain Chicago sojourners generously spread the news, that the cause of her breakdown became apparent to the good doctors. Before many days, the girl who sat, wan and distrait, upon the flower-shaded piazza was an object of curiosity to fashionable Pasadena. As soon as she was strong enough to endure the trip, the hunted trio forsook Pasadena and fled northward.
San Francisco afforded relief in privacy. Jane's spirits began to revive. There had not been, nor was there ever to be, any mention of that terrible night and its revelations. What she may have felt and suffered in secret could only be conjectured by those who loved her. Bansemer's name was never uttered. His fate remained unknown to her. The far-away, unhappy look in her eyes proved to them that Graydon was never out of her thoughts.
David Cable was in Chicago when Mrs. Cable received word from her sister, once Kate Coleman, that she soon would reach San Francisco with her husband, bound for the Philippines. Kate was the wife of a West Pointer who had achieved the rank of colonel in the volunteers, by virtue of political necessity. His regiment had been ordered to the islands, and she was accompanying him with their daughter, a girl of sixteen.
Colonel Harbin had seen pleasant service at the Eastern posts where his wife had attained a certain kind of social distinction in the army fast set. She was not especially enamoured of the prospect ahead of her in the Philippines; but the new colonel was a strict disciplinarian on and off the field. He expected to be a brigadier-general if fortune and favouritism supported him long enough. Mrs. Harbin could never be anything more than a private in the ranks, so far as his estimation of distinction was concerned. His daughter Ethel had, by means of no uncertain favouritism, advanced a few points ahead of her mother, and might have ranked as sergeant in the family corps.