terest him in his future
mistress as to demonstrate the trust I repose in him?"

Malachy received my confidence with less excitement than I had
expected. In fact I was slightly humiliated by his seeming lack
of gratitude. He touched his hat very respectfully, and observed
irrelevantly that the roses below the arbor were looking
uncommonly well. This was a poor reward for my attempt at
consideration, and further convinced me of the uselessness
of establishing anything like intimate relations with the
proletariat.

"By the way, Malachy," I said in parting, "you will keep this
matter a profound secret. Miss Kinglake and I are desirous that
we shall not be annoyed by village chatter and premature
congratulations."

Having discharged my duty to my good servants, I felt that my
obligations, so far as the relation with Phyllis was concerned,
were at an end, and the morning wore away without further
misgivings of disloyalty. In the afternoon Bunsey came over for
his daily smoke, and as we sat together in the library, and I
noticed the entire absence of suspicion in his manner, my heart
smote me. "Truly," I reasoned silently, "I am behaving ill to an
old friend who has never withheld from me the very secrets of his
soul. Should I not be as generous, as outspoken, with him as he
has always proved to me? Should I not confide to him this one
precious secret, at the same time swearing him to preserve it as
he would his life?"

I blew out a ring of smoke, and then I began with the utmost
seriousness: "Bunsey, how do you like the ladies?"

He shifted his position, tipped the ashes from his cigar, and
replied tranquilly: "Oh, I dare say I shall in time."

The answer vexed me. Bunsey was a bachelor, and should have been
therefore the more impressionable. I forgot for the moment, in my
annoyance, that he was a novelist, and had been so diligently
creating lovely and impossible women to order that he was not
easily moved by the realities of humanity.

"At all events," I replied with delicate irony, "I am glad that
the future is hopeful for the ladies. My reason for asking the
question was simply to lead the way to a confidence I intend to
repose in you. To proceed expeditiously to the end of a long
story, I intend to marry one of them."

Bunsey's tranquillity was unshaken. "Which one?"

"Which one?" I echoed with heat, "why, Miss Kinglake, of course."

"Does she intend to marry you?"

"Naturally."

"Or unnaturally?"