you my friend Yate Tyndall--he's poor but
pleasant."

"The fact of poverty is an unpleasantness of itself," affirmed Yate,
extending a hearty hand to Carol's mother.

The expression of the salutation was scarcely valedictory, and Harry
Burnley found himself doomed to solitary departure.

II.

There was--after the manner of suburban vogue--a tennis club in Weytown.
To this the _elite_ of Weytown society, composed mostly of shelved
officers in various degrees of dilapidation, and their growing families,
belonged. Here the Burnleys and Silvers had met, from the years of
teetotum to those of flirtation, and here, outside the cabalistically
marked acre, in their search for truant tennis balls, had Carol and
Rosser commenced the engagement which some said was serious, and others
declared to be but a boy and girl pastime.

When the Burnleys' visitor, Yate Tyndall, appeared upon the scene, which
he did almost immediately after his introduction to the Silvers, there
was spoon diet for the gossips in plenty. Where Carol was, there the six
feet two of the lumbering youth perambulated also; where she was
not--and the colour of her caprices was changeable as the iridescence of
soap-suds--there, _pro tem._, was the soldierly figure extinct.

Burnley laughed, then he chaffed, then he warned. Reminiscences of
Rosser were flaunted, dabbed forth like blisters, their unpleasantness
being excused by their curative intent; but to no avail. Then Harry,
never tolerant of home tattle, suddenly lent himself as its mouthpiece.
Carol was a flirt--nay, more; Rosser, her childhood's one chum, her
girlhood's sweetheart, had been but two months absent, and she had
picked up with, to her, the merest stranger, etc. etc. Harry further
hinted at spiderly instincts, and hummed, "Will you walk into my
parlour" somewhat portentously. The fact was that there was slight
abrasion of his own heart's surface, but that he overlooked to
view himself heroically, as most of us do, and believed his
animus was purely in the interest of his friend. But the friend
rejected salvation--flouted it--and in a few days the subject was
emphatically--Yate could be repulsively emphatic when roused--closed
between them.

On the tennis ground Carol and her new admirer made an almost daily
group. They seldom played, but they wore flannels in compliment to the
surroundings, and dallied with time in talking what one, at least, of
them believed to be philosophy. But, as be