position'!" cried Dick. "But you are very cool and--er--
judicial over it all, Hazel. If you cared as much as I do."

"Perhaps, dear, I am speaking and acting in your own interests,"
answered the girl, softly. "I am setting you a test. It might be that
when you get back home again something might transpire which would make
you devoutly thankful to me for having refused to allow you to engage
yourself to some little nobody whom you had found amusing in the course
of your wanderings."

"Hazel! Now you hurt me."

He looked it. There was no doubt about it that his feelings were deeply
wounded, but there was a dignity about the way in which he took it that
appealed to her so powerfully as well-nigh to bring about her surrender
there and then.

"I didn't mean to, God knows," she answered earnestly and more softly
still. "But I am looking at things from a sheer common-sense
standpoint. You are very brave and strong, Dick, but in one way, I
believe I am stronger than you. I am only putting before you a little
trial of strength, of endurance. Surely _you_ won't shrink from that?"

"Let us understand each other, Hazel," he said gravely, all his boyish
light-heartedness gone. "You won't engage yourself to me until I get my
father's consent?"

"That's it."

"But you will, conditionally, on my getting it?"

She thought a minute.

"I will wait until you do get it, or it is refused. But, Dick,
understand that this doesn't bind _you_ in the slightest degree."

"Oh, but it does bind me. Whoever heard of a one-sided engagement?"
some of his light-heartedness returning. "I'll write to the dear old
dad on the very first opportunity."

"Wouldn't it be better to go yourself than to write?"

"And leave you all that time? No--no, Hazel. I'm not going to give you
that chance of forgetting me."

"Or yourself?" with a significant smile.

"Now you are repeating the offence, and I shan't forgive you unless you
give me just one k--Oh, damn!"

The change of tone, the change of attitude were in keeping, and Dick
found himself in a sort of "standing at attention" rigidity, as small
Jacky Waybridge came lounging down the garden path, a catapult in his
hand. We fear that Dick came near wishing he had left that unwelcome
urchin to the sharks on a former occasion, but that in such case he
himself would not now be here--with Hazel.

"Been shooting any birds, Jacky?" said Dick. "Look. Just over there I
saw a rare clump