f mine!"
I was continuing my sentence quite amiably.

Her face brightened to greet someone approaching behind me.

"Did you hear him?" she said. "_Did_ you hear him, Mr. Churchill. He
casts off--he disowns me. Isn't he a stern brother? And the quarrel is
about nothing." The impudence--or the presence of mind of
it--overwhelmed me.

Churchill smiled pleasantly.

"Oh--one always quarrels about nothing," Churchill answered. He spoke a
few words to her; about my aunt; about the way her machine ran--that
sort of thing. He behaved toward her as if she were an indulged child,
impertinent with licence and welcome enough. He himself looked rather
like the short-sighted, but indulgent and very meagre lion that peers at
the unicorn across a plum-cake.

"So you are going back to Paris," he said. "Miss Churchill will be
sorry. And you are going to continue to--to break up the universe?"

"Oh, yes," she answered, "we are going on with that, my aunt would never
give it up. She couldn't, you know."

"You'll get into trouble," Churchill said, as if he were talking to a
child intent on stealing apples. "And when is our turn coming? You're
going to restore the Stuarts, aren't you?" It was his idea of badinage,
amiable without consequence.

"Oh, not quite that," she answered, "not _quite_ that." It was curious
to watch her talking to another man--to a man, not a bagman like Callan.
She put aside the face she always showed me and became at once what
Churchill took her for--a spoiled child. At times she suggested a
certain kind of American, and had that indefinable air of glib
acquaintance with the names, and none of the spirit of tradition. One
half expected her to utter rhapsodies about donjon-keeps.

"Oh, you know," she said, with a fine affectation of aloofness, "we
shall have to be rather hard upon you; we shall crumple you up like--"
Churchill had been moving his stick absent-mindedly in the dust of the
road, he had produced a big "C H U." She had erased it with the point of
her foot--"like that," she concluded.

He laid his head back and laughed almost heartily.

"Dear me," he said, "I had no idea that I was so much in the way of--of
yourself and Mrs. Granger."

"Oh, it's not only that," she said, with a little smile and a cast of
the eye to me. "But you've got to make way for the future."

Churchill's face changed suddenly. He looked rather old, and grey, and
wintry, even a little frail. I understood what she was prov