st thing, believe me--to your father's
memory."

"I'm afraid," she said, "I wasn't thinking--altogether--of Papa."

I may add that her mother did _not_ understand, and that--when we at
last unlocked the door--we had a terrible scene. The dear lady has
not yet forgiven Antigone; she detests her son-in-law; and I'm
afraid she isn't very fond of me.

THE COSMOPOLITAN

PART I

INLAND

I

Unspeakable, unlikable, worse than all, unsketchable. A woman has no
more formidable rival than her idea in the head of an imaginative
young man, and Maurice Durant had been rash enough to fall in love
with Miss Tancred before sight.

He was rash in everything. When the Colonel asked him down to Coton
Manor for a fortnight, he accepted the invitation (with much
pleasure) by return, and lay awake half the night with joyous
anticipation. He was in the train steaming into the Midlands before
he realized that he knew nothing of his host beyond a vague family
tradition. He was his (Durant's) godfather; he was a retired Colonel
of militia; he had given him (Durant) a hideous silver cup; but this
was the first time he had given him an invitation. There was
something more, too. Durant had spent the last seven years exploring
every country but his own, and he was out of touch with family
tradition; but now he thought of it he had--he certainly had--a
distinct recollection of hearing his father say that of all his
numerous acquaintance that fellow Tancred was quite the most
intolerable bore.

He had been a little precipitate. Still, he said to himself, England
was England, and if there was any fishing on the Colonel's land, or
a decent mount in his stables, he thought he could pull through.
Mrs. Tancred was dead; he did not certainly know that there was a
Miss Tancred, but if there were he meant to flirt with her, and if
the worst came to the worst he could always sketch her (the
unsketchable!).

He had had plenty of time for anticipation during the slow journey
on the branch line from the junction. The train crawled and burrowed
into the wooded heart of the Midlands, passed a village, a hamlet, a
few scattered houses, puffed and panted through endless lengths of
arable and pasture land, drew up exhausted at the little wayside
station of Whithorn-in-Arden, and left him in that prosaic
wilderness a prey to the intolerable bore.

As ill-luck would have it, he had arrived at Coton Manor three hours
before dinner. At the first s