heir ease; at the end a deep
sigh went up from the ladies, cut short by the question which they
immediately fell into.

They could not agree, but they said, one after another: "But you read
beautifully, Mr. Mavering!" "Beautifully!" "Yes, indeed!"

"Well, I'm glad there is one point clear," he said, putting the book
away, and "I'm afraid you'll think I'm rather sentimental," he added, in
a low voice to Alice, "carrying poetry around with me."

"Oh no!" she replied intensely; "I thank you."

"I thank you," he retorted, and their eyes met in a deep look.

One of the outer circle of smokers came up with his watch in his hand,
and addressed the company, "Do you know what time it's got to be? It's
four o'clock."

They all sprang up with a clamour of surprise.

Mrs. Pasmer, under cover of the noise, said, in a low tone, to her
daughter, "Alice, I think you'd better keep a little more with me now."

"Yes," said the girl, in a sympathy with her mother in which she did not
always find herself.

But when Mavering, whom their tacit treaty concerned, turned toward
them, and put himself in charge of Alice, Mrs. Pasmer found herself
dispossessed by the charm of his confidence, and relinquished her to
him. They were going to walk to the Castle Rocks by the path that
now loses and now finds itself among the fastnesses of the forest,
stretching to the loftiest outlook on the bay. The savage woodland is
penetrated only by this forgetful path, that passes now and then aver
the bridge of a ravine, and offers to the eye on either hand the mystery
deepening into wilder and weirder tracts of solitude. The party resolved
itself into twos and threes, and these straggled far apart, out of
conversational reach of one another. Mrs. Pasmer found herself walking
and talking with John Munt.

"Mr. Pasmer hasn't much interest in these excursions," he suggested.

"No; he never goes," she answered, and, by one of the agile intellectual
processes natural to women, she arrived at the question, "You and the
Maverings are old friends, Mr. Munt?"

"I can't say about the son, but I'm his father's friend, and I suppose
that I'm his friend too. Everybody seems to be so," suggested Munt.

"Oh Yes," Mrs. Pasmer assented; "he appears to be a universal
favourite."

"We used to expect great things of Elbridge Mavering in college. We were
rather more romantic than the Harvard men are nowadays, and we believed
in one another more than they do. Perhaps