g face beside him.

"No, no!" says she, shaking her head. "I've been rude, I suppose. But it
is such a wonderful thing to see you here so soon again."

"Why should I not be here?"

"Of course! That is the one unanswerable question. But you must confess
it is puzzling to those who thought of you as being elsewhere."

"If you are one of 'those' you fill me with gratitude. That you should
think of me even for a moment----"

"Well, I haven't been thinking much," says she, frankly, and with the
most delightful if scarcely satisfactory little smile: "I don't believe
I was thinking of you at all, until I turned the corner just now, and
then, I confess, I was startled, because I believed you at the
Antipodes."

"Perhaps your belief was mother to your thought."

"Oh, no. Don't make me out so nasty. Well, but _were_ you there?"

"Perhaps so. Where are they?" asks he gloomily. "One hears a good deal
about them, but they comprise so many places that now-a-days one is
hardly sure where they exactly lie. At all events no one has made them
clear to me."

"Does it rest with me to enlighten you?" asks she, with a little
aggravating half glance from under her long lashes; "well--the North
Pole, Kamtschatka, Smyrna, Timbuctoo, Maoriland, Margate----"

"We'll stop there, I think," says he, with a faint grimace.

"There! At Margate? No, thanks. _You_ can, if you like, but as for
me----"

"I don't suppose you would stop anywhere with me," says he. "I have
occasional glimmerings that I hope mean common sense. No, I have not
been so adventurous as to wander towards Margate. I have only been to
town and back again."

"What town?"

"Eh? What town?" says he astonished. "_London_, you know."

"No, I don't know," says Miss Kavanagh, a little petulantly. "One would
think there was only one town in the world, and that all you English
people had the monopoly of it. There are other towns, I suppose. Even we
poor Irish insignificants have a town or two. Dublin comes under that
head, I suppose?"

"Undoubtedly. Of _course_," making great haste to abase himself. "It is
mere snobbery our making so much of London. A kind of despicable cant,
you know."

"Well, after all, I expect it is a big place in every way," says Miss
Kavanagh, so far mollified by his submission as to be able to allow him
something.

"It's a desert," says Tommy, turning to his aunt, with all the air of
one who is about to impart to her useful information. "It's rag