as
infidelity in the male being."

A few puffs from the pipe, and then Mr Pratt reclimbed to his perch
upon the stone.

"I'll carry that out, and then write it down as a position worthy of
argument. Yes, to be sure. Here it is. A man falls in love--say, for
the sake of argument, at first sight, with a pretty girl, quite unknown
to him before, upon a racecourse. Symptoms: a feeling of sympathetic
attraction; a throbbing of the pulses; and the heart beating bob and go
one. Say he gets to know the girl; is engaged to her; and is then
separated by three or four hundred miles."

A few more puffs, and sundry nods of the head, and then Mr Pratt went
on.

"He there encounters another girl, whose face and general appearance are
so much like the face and general appearance of girl number one, that
his secondary influences--to wit, heart, pulses, and sympathies
generally--immediately give signals; love ensues, and he declares and is
accepted by girl number two, while girl number one says he is
unfaithful. The man is not unfaithful; it is simply an arrangement of
Nature, and he can't help himself. Infidelity, then, is the same thing
in a state of change. Moral: Nature has no business to make women so
much alike."

Mr Pratt got down once more from his perch, and began to stroll up the
lane, to encounter Trevor at the end of a few minutes.

"Did you meet any one?" was the inquiry.

"Yes," said Pratt, "a gentleman and two ladies."

"Well?"

"Well?"

"Did you not know them?"

"Ah!" said Pratt, "then you, too, noticed the similarity of feature, did
you?"

"Similarity?"

"Yes; wonderfully like the ladies we met at the steeplechase, were they
not?"

Richard Trevor looked hard in his friend's face for a moment, and then
they walked on side by side; for at a turn of the lane they met the
young keeper, who had so suddenly changed the aspect of the encounter on
the course.

"Ah, Humphrey!" said Trevor, "I'm glad I've met you. I'll have a walk
round the preserves."

The young keeper touched his hat, changed the double gun from one
shoulder of his well-worn velveteen coat to the other, whistled to a
setter, and led the way to a stone stile.

"Another curious case of similarity of feature," said Trevor, laughing.

"Well, no--I'll give in now," said Pratt; "but I say, Dick, old fellow,
ought coincidences like this to occur out of novels?"

"Never mind that," said Trevor, "the keeper here, who used to be my
pl