?"

"No, thanks."

"Given it up, eh? Daresay you're wise. Stunts the growth and increases
the expenses."

"Given it up?"

"Don't you remember sharing one of your father's cigars with me behind
the haystack in the meadow? We cut it in half. I finished my half, but
I fancy about three puffs were enough for you. Those were happy days!"

"That one wasn't! Of course I remember it now. I don't suppose I shall
ever forget it."

"The thing was my fault, as usual. I recollect I dared you."

"Yes. I always took a dare."

"Do you still?"

"What do you mean?"

Wally knocked the ash off his cigarette.

"Well," he said slowly, "suppose! were to dare you to get up and walk
over to that table and look your fiance in the eye and say, 'Stop
scowling at my back hair! I've a perfect right to be supping with an
old friend!'--would you do it?"

"Is he?" said Jill startled.

"Scowling? Can't you feel it on the back of your head?" He drew
thoughtfully at his cigarette. "If I were you I should stop that sort
of thing at the source. It's a habit that can't be discouraged in a
husband too early. Scowling is the civilized man's substitute for
wife-beating."

Jill moved uncomfortably in her chair. Her quick temper resented his
tone. There was a hostility, a hardly veiled contempt in his voice
which stung her. Derek was sacred. Whoever criticised him, presumed.
Wally, a few minutes before a friend and an agreeable companion,
seemed to her to have changed. He was once more the boy whom she had
disliked in the old days. There was a gleam in her eyes which should
have warned him, but he went on.

"I should imagine that this Derek of yours is not one of our leading
sunbeams. Well, I suppose he could hardly be, if that's his mother and
there is anything in heredity."

"Please don't criticise Derek," said Jill coldly.

"I was only saying...."

"Never mind. I don't like it."

A slow flush crept over Wally's face. He made no reply, and there fell
between them a silence that was like a shadow, Jill sipped her coffee
miserably. She was regretting that little spurt of temper. She wished
she could have recalled the words. Not that it was the actual words
that had torn asunder this gossamer thing, the friendship which they
had begun to weave like some fragile web: it was her manner, the
manner of the princess rebuking an underling. She knew that, if she
had struck him, she could not have offended Wally more deeply. There
are some men