tood still in the middle of the road, and Mattie rushed up to
him:

"We are going for a walk. Oh, Archie, I wish you would come too! It
would be such fun!"

"Yes; do come!" cried unconscious Nan, seconding her out of pure good
nature. "Mr. Drummond, this is our cousin, Sir Henry Challoner, who
has just come from Australia; and we have never seen him before." And
then the young clergyman shook hands with him very stiffly, and spoke
a few conventional words.

"They have not a man belonging to them," he had said to himself,
triumphantly, and then that odious Dick had turned up and now this
extraordinary-looking being who called himself Sir Henry Challoner.

Archie took down the "Peerage" when he got home, for he could not be
induced to join the merry party in their walk. He found the name there
all right,--"Henry Fortescue Challoner, son of Sir Francis Challoner,
son of Sir Henry Challoner," and so on. It was an old baronetcy,--one
of the oldest in England,--but the estates had dwindled down to a
half-ruined residence and a few fields. "Challoner Place," as it was
called, was nothing but a heap of mouldering walls; but Mattie had
whispered to him gleefully that he was "awfully rich, and the head of
the family, and unmarried; and he did not mean to let his cousins make
gowns anymore for other people, though they might do it for
themselves."

Mattie never forgot that walk. Never in her life had she enjoyed such
fun. Archie, with his grave face and prim ways, would have spoiled the
hilarity.

First Sir Henry took his cousins to the hotel, where they heard him
order his apartments and dinner: he evidently considered he had not
dined; and there was a good deal of discussion about some game that he
ordered, and a certain brand of champagne that was to his liking.

"If they make me comfortable, I may stop on a goodish bit," he
informed them, "until we have settled where my aunt would like to
live. I shall run up to London every few days, and can do all your
commissions. By the bye, I got some trinkets for you girls on my way
down; we will haul them over when I come up for the cup of coffee Aunt
Catherine promised me this evening."

"Now, Harry, we don't want presents," remarked Phillis, taking him to
task as easily as though she had known him all her life long.

In spite of his bigness, his great burly figure and plain face, there
was something very pleasant about him. He was rough and unpolished,
his dress was carele