a round of
visits to country-houses in Scotland, where, as she wrote him, she was
painting miniatures of her hosts and studying the game of golf. Miss
Cavendish divided her days between the river and one of the West End
theatres. She was playing a small part in a farce-comedy.

One day she came up from Cookham earlier than usual, looking very
beautiful in a white boating-frock and a straw hat with a Leander
ribbon. Her hands and arms were hard with dragging a punting-hole, and
she was sunburnt and happy, and hungry for tea.

"Why don't you come down to Cookham and get out of this heat?" Miss
Cavendish asked. "You need it; you look ill."

"I'd like to, but I can't," said Carroll. "The fact is, I paid in
advance for these rooms, and if I lived anywhere else I'd be losing
five guineas a week on them."

Miss Cavendish regarded him severely. She had never quite mastered his
American humor.

"But--five guineas--why, that's nothing to you," she said. Something
in the lodger's face made her pause. "You don't mean--"

"Yes, I do," said the lodger, smiling. "You see, I started in to lay
siege to London without sufficient ammunition. London is a large town,
and it didn't fall as quickly as I thought it would. So I am
economizing. Mr. Lockhart's Coffee Rooms and I are no longer
strangers."

Miss Cavendish put down her cup of tea untasted and leaned toward him.

"Are you in earnest?" she asked. "For how long?"

"Oh, for the last month," replied the lodger; "they are not at all
bad--clean and wholesome and all that."

"But the suppers you gave us, and this," she cried, suddenly, waving
her hands over the pretty tea-things, "and the cake and muffins?"

"My friends, at least," said Carroll, "need not go to Lockhart's."

"And the Savoy?" asked Miss Cavendish, mournfully shaking her head. "A
dream of the past," said Carroll, waving his pipe through the smoke.
"Gatti's? Yes, on special occasions; but for necessity the
Chancellor's, where one gets a piece of the prime roast beef of Old
England, from Chicago, and potatoes for ninepence--a pot of bitter
twopence-halfpenny, and a penny for the waiter. It's most amusing on
the whole. I am learning a little about London, and some things about
myself. They are both most interesting subjects."

"Well, I don't like it," Miss Cavendish declared, helplessly. "When I
think of those suppers and the flowers, I feel--I feel like a robber."

"Don't," begged Carroll. "I am really the most