hen Eve was in short frocks, and Charles
conspicuously absent. Like Lady Garnett, I find the barrister
exhausting. He is very unlike his father."

"We are going to Switzerland with them this summer, you know,
Philip? Will you join us?"

"Ah!" he put his cup down, not responding for a moment. "It would be
delightful, but I am afraid impossible. You see, there's the dock;
I have been away from it six months, and I shall have to repeat the
process when the fogs begin. No, Lady Garnett, I won't be tempted."

She began to press him, and they fenced rapidly for some minutes,
laughing. Rainham had just been induced to promise that he would at
least consider the proposition, when the footman announced Mr. and
Miss Sylvester. They came in a moment later; and while the
barrister, a tall well-dressed man, with the shaven upper lip and
neat whisker of his class, and a back which seemed to bend with
difficulty, explained to Lady Garnett that his mother was suffering
too much from neuralgia to come with them, Rainham resumed his
acquaintance with the young girl. He had seen little of her during
the past two years, and in the last of them, in which she had
changed most, he had not seen her at all. It was with a slight
shock, then, that he realized how completely she had grown up. He
remembered her in so many phases of childhood and little girlhood,
ranging up from a time when her speech was incoherent, and she had
sat on his knee and played with his watch, to the more recent
occasions when he had met her riding in the Park with her brother;
and she had waved her little whip to him, looking particularly slim
and pretty in the very trying costume which fashion prescribes for
little girls who ride.

They had always been very good friends; she had been a most engaging
little companion, and really, he reflected, he had been extremely
fond of her. It gave him a distinct pain to reflect that their
relation had, in the nature of things, come to an end. Gradually, as
they talked, the young girl growing out of the first restraint of
her shyness, and falling back into something of her old manner, the
first painful impression of her entire strangeness left Rainham. In
spite of her mature, little society air, her engaging attempts at
worldliness, she was, after all, not so grown-up as she seemed. The
child gleamed out here and there quite daintily, and as he indulged
in reminiscence, and reminded her of some of their more remote
adventures,