n this 'ere miserable, insulting chap shoves his head in
at the door and calls the young lady names."

"Names?" said the captain, frowning, and waving an interruption from
Hartley aside. "What names?"

Mr. Walters hesitated again, and his brow grew almost as black as the
captain's.

"'Rosy-lips,'" he said, at last; "and I give 'im such a wipe acrost--"

"Out you go," cried the wrathful captain. "Out you go, and if I hear
your pretty little voice in this house again you'll remember it, I can
tell you. D'ye hear? Scoot!"

Mr. Walters said "Thank you," and, retiring with an air of great
deference, closed the door softly behind him.

"There's another of them," said Captain Trimblett subsiding into a
chair. "And from little things I had heard here and there I thought he
regarded women as poison. Fate again, I suppose; he was made to regard
them as poison all these years for the sake of being caught by that
tow-headed wench in your kitchen."

CHAPTER XII

BY no means insensible to the difficulties in the way, Joan Hartley had
given no encouragement to Mr. Robert Vyner to follow up the advantage
afforded him by her admission at the breakfast-table. Her father's
uneasiness, coupled with the broad hints which Captain Trimblett mistook
for tactfulness, only confirmed her in her resolution; and Mr. Vyner, in
his calmer moments, had to admit to himself that she was right--for
the present, at any rate. Meantime, they were both young, and, with the
confidence of youth, he looked forward to a future in which his
father's well-known views on social distinctions and fitting matrimonial
alliances should have undergone a complete change. As to his mother, she
merely seconded his father's opinions, and, with admiration born of love
and her marriage vows, filed them for reference in a memory which had on
more than one occasion been a source of great embarrassment to a man who
had not lived for over fifty years without changing some of them.

Deeply conscious of his own moderation, it was, therefore, with a sense
of annoyance that Mr. Robert Vyner discovered that Captain Trimblett was
actually attempting to tackle him upon the subject which he considered
least suitable for discussion. They were sitting in his office, and
the captain, in pursuance of a promise to Hartley, after two or three
references to the weather, and a long account of an uninteresting
conversation with a policeman, began to get on to dangerous ground.

"