at yourself?'

'Until you are tired of holding me? Oh, I want to ask you something.'
And she turned round. 'Now tell truly, won't you? What colour of hair do
you like best now?'

Knight did not answer at the moment.

'Say light, do!' she whispered coaxingly. 'Don't say dark, as you did
that time.'

'Light-brown, then. Exactly the colour of my sweetheart's.'

'Really?' said Elfride, enjoying as truth what she knew to be flattery.

'Yes.'

'And blue eyes, too, not hazel? Say yes, say yes!'

'One recantation is enough for to-day.'

'No, no.'

'Very well, blue eyes.' And Knight laughed, and drew her close and
kissed her the second time, which operations he performed with the
carefulness of a fruiterer touching a bunch of grapes so as not to
disturb their bloom.

Elfride objected to a second, and flung away her face, the movement
causing a slight disarrangement of hat and hair. Hardly thinking what
she said in the trepidation of the moment, she exclaimed, clapping her
hand to her ear--

'Ah, we must be careful! I lost the other earring doing like this.'

No sooner did she realise the significant words than a troubled look
passed across her face, and she shut her lips as if to keep them back.

'Doing like what?' said Knight, perplexed.

'Oh, sitting down out of doors,' she replied hastily.

Chapter XXIX

'Care, thou canker.'

It is an evening at the beginning of October, and the mellowest of
autumn sunsets irradiates London, even to its uttermost eastern end.
Between the eye and the flaming West, columns of smoke stand up in the
still air like tall trees. Everything in the shade is rich and misty
blue.

Mr. and Mrs. Swancourt and Elfride are looking at these lustrous and
lurid contrasts from the window of a large hotel near London Bridge. The
visit to their friends at St. Leonards is over, and they are staying a
day or two in the metropolis on their way home.

Knight spent the same interval of time in crossing over to Brittany
by way of Jersey and St. Malo. He then passed through Normandy, and
returned to London also, his arrival there having been two days later
than that of Elfride and her parents.

So the evening of this October day saw them all meeting at the
above-mentioned hotel, where they had previously engaged apartments.
During the afternoon Knight had been to his lodgings at Richmond to make
a little change in the nature of his baggage; and on coming up again
there was neve