d the pier. They mounted the hill in some silence. It was
difficult for Robinette to get along with her shoeless foot; Lavendar
wanted to help her, but she demanded Carnaby's arm. He was sulking
still. There was something he felt, but could not understand, in the
subtle atmosphere of happiness by which the truant couple seemed to be
surrounded; a something through which he could not reach; that seemed
to put Robinette at a distance from him, although her shoulder touched
his and her hand was on his arm. Growing pangs of his manhood assailed
him, the male's jealousy of the other male. For the moment he hated
Mark; Mark talking joyous nonsense in a way rather unlike himself, as
if the night air had gone to his head.

"I am glad you had the ferrets to amuse you this afternoon," said
Robinette, in a propitiatory tone. "Ferrets are such darlings, aren't
they, with their pink eyes?"

"O! _darlings_," assented Carnaby derisively. "One of the darlings
bit my finger to the bone, not that that's anything to you."

"Oh! Middy dear, I am sorry!" cried Robinette. "I'd kiss the place to
make it well, if we weren't in such a hurry!"

Carnaby began to find that a dignified reserve of manner was very
difficult to keep up. His grandmother could manage it, he reflected,
but he would need some practice. When they came to a place where there
were sharp stones strewn on the road, he became a mere boy again quite
suddenly, and proposed a "queen's chair" for Robinette. And so he and
Lavendar crossed hands, and one arm of Robinette encircled the boy's
head, while the other just touched Lavendar's neck enough to be
steadied by it. Their laughter frightened the sleepy birds that night.
The demoralized remnant of a Bank Holiday party would have been,
Lavendar observed, respectability itself in comparison with them; and
certainly no such group had ever approached Stoke Revel before. They
were to enter by a back door, and Carnaby was to introduce them to
the housekeeper's room, where he undertook that Bates would feed them.
Lavendar alone was to be ambassador to the drawing room.

"The only one of us with a boot on each foot, of course we appoint him
by a unanimous vote," said Robinette.

But the chief thing that Carnaby remembered, after all, of that
evening's adventure, was Robinette's sudden impulsive kiss as she bade
him good-night, Lavendar standing by. She had never kissed him before,
for all her cousinliness, but she just brushed his co