ng admiration for
Desmond, and aspired to become the wife of a cavalry officer--Harry
Denvil being the temporary hero of her dreams.

When her brother entered the room she was fitfully engaged in
perpetrating a crewel-work atrocity for one of her many chairs.

He did not speak his thought at once, but stood looking down at her
critically through the smoke-wreaths of his cigar. The major share of
good looks certainly rested with himself; but for eyes set too near
together, and the relentless lines that envy and ill-humour pencil
about a man's mouth, the face was attractive enough, in its limited
fashion. He had the same air of being "off duty" which pervaded his
sister, and his Japanese smoking-suit showed signs of being a very old
friend indeed.

"Look here, Linda," he began at last, "when are we playing tennis
again with little Mrs Desmond?"

"I think it was Tuesday," she said.

"Well, then, ask her to tea here first, d'you see?"

Linda's brown eyes--it pleased her to call them hazel--widened with
surprise.

"Oh, my! D'you think she would reallee come? It was nastee of her to
leave us out of her picnic like that, after she told me all about it,
too."

Miss Kresney's insistence on the consonants and the final vowels was
more marked than her brother's; for although three-fourths of the
blood in her veins was English, very few of her intimate associates
could make so proud a boast without perjuring their souls: and there
are few things more infectious than tricks of speech.

"Yes, of course," he acquiesced readily. "But I'm jolly well certain
that was not her doing. She'll come, right enough, if you ask her
nicely. At all events it is worth trying, if only on the chance of
annoying her insufferable husband."

"If you wish it, certainlee. I would like to be better friends with
Mrs Desmond. Only, I do not quite see why you dislike _him_ so much
more than the others."

Kresney hesitated before replying. It was not often that Linda aspired
to question either his motives or decisions; and he had begun to
suspect that her loyalty wavered, by a hair's-breadth, where Desmond
was concerned. After all, why not tell her an expurgated edition of
the truth. The idea commended itself to him for many reasons, and even
as she was beginning to wonder at his silence he sat down beside her
and spoke; the sting of humiliation stimulating his inventive faculty
as he went on.

Desmond himself would scarce have recognised the i