stricken Gower with indignant eyes.

"Don't do that again," she says, with trembling lips. Her whole
attitude--voice and expression--are undeniably childish, yet she
frightens Gower nearly out of his wits.

"I beg your pardon," he stammers, eagerly, growing quite white. "I must
_insist_ on your understanding I did not mean it. How could you think
it? I--"

At this instant Roger laughs. The laugh comes to Dulce as she stands
before Gower grieved and angry and repentant, and her whole face
changes. The grief and the repentance vanish, the very anger fades into
weariness.

"Yes, I believe you--I was foolish--it doesn't matter," she says,
heavily; and then she sinks into her seat again, and taking a small
volume of selected poetry from a rustic table at her elbow, throws it
into his lap.

"Read me something," she says, gently.

"What shall I select?" asks Stephen, puzzled by the sudden change in her
manner, but anxious to please her.

"Anything. It hardly matters; they are all pretty," she says,
disconnectedly, and so indifferently that he is fairly piqued; his
reading being one of his strongest points; and taking up the book, he
opens it at random, and begins to read in a low, sweet, rhyming voice
that certainly carries its own charm.

Dulce, in spite of herself, is by degrees drawn to listen to it; yet
though the words so softly spoken attract her and chain her attention,
there is always a line of discontent around her lovely mouth, and a
certain angry petulance within her eyes, and in the gesture with which
she furls and unfurls her huge black fan.

Dicky Browne, who has confiscated all the cake, and is therefore free to
go where he lists, has drawn near to her, and, under cover of a
cigarette, is pretending to be absorbed in the poetry. Gower has fallen
now upon Gray's Elegy in a Churchyard, and is getting through it most
effectively. All the others have grown silent, either touched by the
beauty of the dying daylight, or the tender lines that are falling on
the air. When at length Stephen finishes the poem, and his voice ceases
to break the stillness of the coming eve, no one stirs, and an utter
calm ensues. It is broken by the irrepressible Julia.

"What a charming thing that is," she says, alluding, they presume, to
the Elegy. She pauses here, but no one takes her up or seems to care to
continue the praise of what is almost beyond it. But Julia is not easily
discouraged.

"One can almost see the gaunt