der, looking at us."

Philip Sheldon came out into the garden as George said this, It was one
of those sultry evenings on which the most delightful of gothic villas
is apt to be too stifling for endurance; and in most of the prim
suburban gardens there were people lounging listlessly among the
flower-beds. Mr. Sheldon came to look at this patrician stranger who
had just embraced his daughter's companion; whereupon Captain Paget
introduced himself and his friend Mr. Hawkehurst. After the
introduction Mr. Sheldon and the Captain fell into an easy
conversation, while the two girls walked slowly along the gravel
pathway with Valentine by their side, and while George loitered
drearily along, chewing the stalk of a geranium, and pondering the
obscure reminiscences of the last oldest inhabitant whose shadowy
memories he had evoked in his search after new links in the chain of
the Haygarths.

The two girls walked in the familiar schoolgirl fashion of Hyde Lodge,
Charlotte's arm encircling the waist of her friend. They were both
dressed in white muslin, and looked very shadowy and sylph-like in the
summer dusk. Mr. Hawkehurst found himself in a new atmosphere in this
suburban garden, with these two white-robed damsels by his side; for it
seemed to him that Diana with Charlotte's arm round her waist, and a
certain shy gentleness of manner which was new to him, was quite a
different person from that Miss Paget whose wan face had looked at him
so anxiously in the saloons of the Belgian Kursaal.

At first there was considerable restraint in the tone of the
conversation, and some little of that unnecessary discussion as to
whether this evening was warmer than the preceding evening, or whether
it was not, indeed, the warmest evening of all that summer. And then,
when the ice was broken, Mr. Hawkehurst began to talk at his ease about
Paris, which city Miss Halliday had never seen; about the last book,
the last play, the last folly, the last fashionable bonnet; for it was
one of the special attributes of this young Robert Macaire to be able
to talk about anything, and to adapt himself to any society. Charlotte
opened her eyes to their widest extent as she listened to this animated
stranger. She had been so wearied by the dry as dust arguments of City
men who had discussed the schemes of great contractors, "which will
never be carried out, sir, while money is at its present rate, mark my
words,"--or the chances of a company "which is