him pick up
her handkerchief."

Mrs. Small's eyes boiled with excitement.

"And did he give it her back?" she asked.

"Give it back?" said Swithin: "I saw him slobber on it when he thought I
wasn't looking!"

Mrs. Small gasped--too interested to speak.

"But she gave him no encouragement," went on Swithin; he stopped, and
stared for a minute or two in the way that alarmed Aunt Hester so--he had
suddenly recollected that, as they were starting back in the phaeton, she
had given Bosinney her hand a second time, and let it stay there too....
He had touched his horses smartly with the whip, anxious to get her all
to himself. But she had looked back, and she had not answered his first
question; neither had he been able to see her face--she had kept it
hanging down.

There is somewhere a picture, which Swithin has not seen, of a man
sitting on a rock, and by him, immersed in the still, green water, a
sea-nymph lying on her back, with her hand on her naked breast. She has
a half-smile on her face--a smile of hopeless surrender and of secret
joy.

Seated by Swithin's side, Irene may have been smiling like that.

When, warmed by champagne, he had her all to himself, he unbosomed
himself of his wrongs; of his smothered resentment against the new chef
at the club; his worry over the house in Wigmore Street, where the
rascally tenant had gone bankrupt through helping his brother-in-law as
if charity did not begin at home; of his deafness, too, and that pain he
sometimes got in his right side. She listened, her eyes swimming under
their lids. He thought she was thinking deeply of his troubles, and
pitied himself terribly. Yet in his fur coat, with frogs across the
breast, his top hat aslant, driving this beautiful woman, he had never
felt more distinguished.

A coster, however, taking his girl for a Sunday airing, seemed to have
the same impression about himself. This person had flogged his donkey
into a gallop alongside, and sat, upright as a waxwork, in his shallopy
chariot, his chin settled pompously on a red handkerchief, like Swithin's
on his full cravat; while his girl, with the ends of a fly-blown boa
floating out behind, aped a woman of fashion. Her swain moved a stick
with a ragged bit of string dangling from the end, reproducing with
strange fidelity the circular flourish of Swithin's whip, and rolled his
head at his lady with a leer that had a weird likeness to Swithin's
primeval stare.

Though for a ti