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By Root 1555 0

a doze induced by the unwonted half glass of whisky. Her early dinner, an unappetising meal of boiled mutton and rice pudding, was but a short interlude in the dullness of the morning; and after it was eaten, a burning tract of afternoon extended itself between her and Mr. Dysart’s promised visit. She looked out of the window at the sailing shreds of white cloud high up in the deep blue of the sky, at the fat bees swinging and droning in the purple blossoms of the columbine border, at two kittens playing furiously in the depths of the mignonette bed; and regardless of Charlotte’s injunctions about the heat of the sun, she said to herself that she would go out into the garden for a little. It was three o’clock, and her room was as hot as an oven when she went up to get her hat; her head ached as she stood before the glass and arranged the wide brim to her satisfaction, and stuck her best paste pin into the sailor’s knot of her tie. Suddenly the door burst unceremoniously open, and Norry’s grey head and filthy face were thrust round the edge of it.

“Come down, Miss Francie!” she said in a fierce whisper; “give over making shnouts at yerself in the glass and hurry on down! Louisa isn’t in, and sure I can’t open the doore the figure I am.”

“Who’s there?” asked Francie, with flushing cheeks.

“How would I know? I’d say ‘twas Misther Lambert’s knock whatever. Sich galloppin’ in and out of the house as there is these two days! Ye may let in this one yerself!”

When Francie opened the hall-door she was both relieved and disappointed to find that Norry had been right in the matter of the knock. Mr. Lambert was apparently more taken by surprise than she was. He did not speak at once, but, taking her hand, pressed it very hard, and when Francie, finding the silence slightly embarrassing, looked up at him with a laugh that was intended to simplify the situation, she was both amazed and frightened to see a moisture suspiciously like tears in his eyes.

“You—you look rather washed out,” he stammered.

“You’re very polite! Is that all you have to say to me?” she said, slipping her hand out of his, and gaily ignoring his tragic tone. “You and your old yacht nearly washed me out altogether! At all events, you washed the colour out of me pretty well.” She put up her hands and rubbed her cheeks. “Are you coming in or going out? Charlotte’s lunching at the Bakers’, and I’m going into the garden till tea-time, so now you can do as you like.”

“I’ll come into the garden with you,” he said stepping aside to let her pass out. “But are you sure your head is well enough for you to go out in this sun?”

“Sun your granny!” responded Francie, walking gingerly across the gravel in her high-heeled house shoes, “I’m as well as ever I was.”

“Well, you don’t look it,” he said with a concerned glance at the faint colour in her cheeks and the violet shadows under her eyes. “Come and sit down in the shade; it’s about all you’re good for.”

A path skirted the flower-beds and bent round the evergreen-covered slope that rose between the house and the road, and at the bend a lime-tree spread its flat, green boughs lavishly over the path, shading a seat made of half-rotten larch poles that extended its dilapidated arms to the passer-by.

“Well now tell me all about it,” began Lambert as soon as they had sat down. “What did you feel like when you began to remember it all? Were you very angry with me?”

“Yes, of course, I was angry with you, and I am now this minute, and haven’t I a good right, with my new hat at the bottom of the lake?”

“I can tell you we were both pretty nearly at the bottom of the lake along with it,” said Lambert, who disapproved of this frivolous way of treating the affair. “I don’t suppose I ever was nearer death than I was when the sail was on top of me.”

Francie looked at him for one instant with awestruck eyes, and Lambert was congratulating himself on having made her realise the seriousness of the situation, when she suddenly burst out laughing.

“Oh!” she apologised, “the thought just came into my head of the look of Mrs. Lambert in