hings to do
in the garden. By the way, was your father at Trinity, Oxford?"

"No, he was at Exeter."

"Ah, then I didn't know him. I knew a Hazlewood at Trinity."

The Rector turned away to business elsewhere, and Guy was left to puzzle
over his casual allusion. Perhaps he ought to have raised the subject of
being in love with Pauline, for which purpose the Rector may have given
him an opening. Or did this inquiry about his father portend a letter to
him from the Rector about his son's prospects? He certainly ought to
have said something to make the Rector realize how much tact would be
necessary in approaching his father. Pauline called again from the
nursery window, and Guy hurried off to join the rest of the family at
tea.

In the drawing-room Mrs. Grey, Monica, and Margaret all seemed anxious
to show their pleasure in Pauline's happiness; and Guy in the assurance
this old house gave him of a smooth course for his love ceased to worry
any longer about parental problems and was content to live in the merry
and intimate present. He realized how far he was advanced in his
relation to the family when Brydone, the doctor's son, came in to call.
Guy took a malicious delight in his stilted talk, as for half an hour he
tried to explain to Monica, a grave and abstracted listener, how the
pike would in March go up the ditches and the shallow backwaters, and
what great sport it was to snare them with a copper noose suspended from
a long pole. There was, too, that triumphant moment he had long desired,
when Brydone, rising to take his leave, asked if Guy were coming and
when he was able to reply casually that he was not coming just yet.

After tea Guy and Pauline, as if by an impulse that occurred to both of
them simultaneously, begged Margaret to come and talk in the nursery.
She seemed pleased that they wanted her; and the three of them spent the
time till dinner in looking at the old familiar things of childhood--at
photographs of Monica and Margaret and Pauline in short frocks; at
tattered volumes scrawled in by the fingers of little girls.

"I wish I'd known you when you were small," sighed Guy. "How wasted all
these years seem."

The gong went suddenly, and Margaret said that of course to-night he
would stay to dinner.

So once again he was staying to dinner, and now on such terms as would
make this an occasion difficult to forget. As he waited alone in the
lamplit nursery, while Margaret and Pauline were dressing