them in her lap.
"Will it surprise you to learn that flowers are a passion with me, and
that I am a living refutation of the fallacy that 'there can be nothing
very wrong about a man who can cultivate a garden'?"

She looked up at him and smiled.

"I think nothing about you will surprise me--you are so many-sided
and--if you will pardon me saying it--so different from what one
imagines men of--of your calling to be," she said; and laughed a little,
colouring divinely until her face was like the roses themselves. "You
treat me as if I were a queen; and I am not used to Court manners.
Where, if you please, did you acquire yours?"

"In the vast Kingdom of the World," he made answer, with just a
momentary change of countenance--a mere suspicion of embarrassment:
laughed off before she could be quite sure that it had had any real
existence. "Please remember that to appear to be what one is not, and to
ape manners foreign to one's real self is part of what you have so
nicely, so euphemistically, termed 'my calling.' I am an Actor on the
World's Stage, Miss Lorne; I should be but a very poor one if I could
not accommodate myself to many roles."

"If you play them all so well as you do that of the _preux chevalier_,
it is no wonder you are a success," she replied gaily, slipping thus
into easy conversation with him.

And so it fell out that the magazines and the illustrated papers were
not so much of a boon as both had fancied they might be when Cleek
brought them to her; for they had not even been opened when the train
ran up to the quay side at Calais and brought them almost abreast of the
channel steamer.

CHAPTER XI

It was not until they were aboard the boat and the shores of France were
slipping off into the distance that Miss Lorne saw anything at all of
Dollops. As he had travelled down from Paris to Calais in a separate
compartment there had been no opportunity to do so. He had, too, held
himself respectfully aloof even after they had boarded the steamer; and,
but that once, when a lurch of the vessel had unexpectedly disturbed
Cleek's equilibrium and knocked his hat off, she might not have seen him
even then.

But the manner in which he pounced upon that hat, the tender care with
which he brushed it, and the affectionate interest in both voice and
eyes when he handed it back and inquired eagerly, "Didn't hurt yourself,
Gov'nor, did you, sir?" compelled her to take notice of him, and, in
doing so, t