time of the boy's
inconceivable meanderings in Hyde Park. And two of them were at it still.

On a terrace outside lighted windows a powerful young fellow, in a
butterfly collar and a corded smoking jacket, was walking up and down with
a tall girl not unlike him in the face; but their faces were only to be
seen in glimpses as they passed the drawing-room windows, and at not less
regular intervals when a red light in the sky, the source of which was
concealed by the garden foliage, became positively brilliant. The air was
sweet with the scent of honeysuckle and musk-roses and mown grass; midges
fretted in and out of the open windows. But for the lurid lighting of the
sky, with its Cyclopean suggestion of some mammoth forge, you were in the
heart of England undefiled.

"It's no use our talking about Tony," the tall girl said. "I think you're
frightfully down on him; we shall never agree."

"Not as long as you make a fool of the fellow," said the blunt young man.

"Tony's no fool," remarked Lettice Upton, irrelevantly enough.

"You know what I mean," snapped her brother Horace. "He's being
absolutely spoilt, and you're at the bottom of it."

"I didn't give him asthma!"

"Don't be childish, Letty."

"But that's what's spoiling his life."

"I wasn't talking about his life. I don't believe it, either."

"You think he enjoys his bad nights?"

"I think he scores by them. He'd tell you himself that he never even
thinks of getting up to first school now."

"Would you if you'd been sitting up half the night with asthma?"

"Perhaps not; but I don't believe that happens so often as you think."

"It happens often enough to justify him in making one good night pay for
two or three bad ones."

"I don't call that playing the game. I call it shamming."

"Well, if it is, he makes up for it. They were doing Ancient Greek
Geography in his form at early school last term. Tony tackled it in his
spare time, and got most marks in the exam."

"Beastly young swot!" quoth his elder brother. "I'm glad he didn't buck
to me about that."

"I don't think there's much danger of his bucking to you," said Lettice,
smiling in the red light. She did not add as her obvious reason that
Horace, like many another athletic young man, was quite incapable of
sympathising with the non-athletic type. But he guessed that she meant
something of the sort, and having sensibilities of his own, and a good
heart somewhere in his mesh of muscl