a pleasant study for this afternoon.'

She went away. 'I am no man of the world,' he thought. 'I ought to have
praised that father of hers straight off. I shall not win her respect;
much less her love!'

XII.

Somerset did not forget what he had planned, and when lunch was over
he walked away through the trees. The tunnel was more difficult of
discovery than he had anticipated, and it was only after considerable
winding among green lanes, whose deep ruts were like canyons of Colorado
in miniature, that he reached the slope in the distant upland where the
tunnel began. A road stretched over its crest, and thence along one side
of the railway-cutting.

He there unexpectedly saw standing Miss Power's carriage; and on drawing
nearer he found it to contain Paula herself, Miss De Stancy, and Mrs.
Goodman.

'How singular!' exclaimed Miss De Stancy gaily.

'It is most natural,' said Paula instantly. 'In the morning two people
discuss a feature in the landscape, and in the afternoon each has a
desire to see it from what the other has said of it. Therefore they
accidentally meet.'

Now Paula had distinctly heard Somerset declare that he was going to
walk there; how then could she say this so coolly? It was with a pang
at his heart that he returned to his old thought of her being possibly
a finished coquette and dissembler. Whatever she might be, she was not a
creature starched very stiffly by Puritanism.

Somerset looked down on the mouth of the tunnel. The popular commonplace
that science, steam, and travel must always be unromantic and hideous,
was not proven at this spot. On either slope of the deep cutting, green
with long grass, grew drooping young trees of ash, beech, and other
flexible varieties, their foliage almost concealing the actual railway
which ran along the bottom, its thin steel rails gleaming like silver
threads in the depths. The vertical front of the tunnel, faced with
brick that had once been red, was now weather-stained, lichened, and
mossed over in harmonious rusty-browns, pearly greys, and neutral
greens, at the very base appearing a little blue-black spot like a
mouse-hole--the tunnel's mouth.

The carriage was drawn up quite close to the wood railing, and Paula was
looking down at the same time with him; but he made no remark to her.

Mrs. Goodman broke the silence by saying, 'If it were not a railway we
should call it a lovely dell.'

Somerset agreed with her, adding that it was so cha