little Lady Eileen?"

"Very much; same way she likes me. We're good chums."

"If you don't believe what I say, Petro, there's a splendid way of
finding out. Ask her."

"See here, my dear girl, haven't you got anything better to do this
morning than to loll all over my sofa and talk drivel when I want to
write a letter blowing up somebody? I felt a fool when you came in.
Now you've made me feel a double-dyed idiot. Kindly go away and dig a
hole in the ground with yourself."

Ena went. But she felt that, despite discouragement, she had already
dug a tiny, tiny hole in very hard ground, not for herself, but for a
little seed which might perhaps send out its shoots later.

It did not precisely do that; but as the ground raked over was Petro's
heart, the seed his sister had left made him uncomfortable. It burned
and stung and felt alive, and something had to be done about it.

Of course Ena was wrong. He was the last fellow in the world a girl
could care for. He had learned that to his sorrow. A girl couldn't
even like him. There was something about him that bored her nearly to
death as soon as she began to know him fairly well, and made her want
to bolt. He was as sure, he told himself, of the exact nature of nice
little Lady Eileen's feeling for him as of his for her. Nevertheless,
that night at a dance, when he and she (for the best of reasons, they
didn't know how) were sitting out the tango, he found himself becoming
confidential.

This was strange, for Petro had one of his father's characteristics if
no other--he did not confide things in people. Peter senior kept his
own secrets because it was wise to keep them. Peter junior kept his
partly because he thought they would bore every one save himself. So
even where the two were alike, they were miles apart. For some vague
reason, however--which, if he had stopped to define it, would have
convinced him that he was disgustingly conceited--Petro was moved that
night, in a new-fashioned conservatory resembling a jungle, to tell
Lady Eileen one or two things about himself.

How it started he was not quite sure, but with some awkwardness he had
tried to lead up to the subject, and suddenly Eileen had begun to help
him out.

"I used to think a man would have to know a lot about a girl," he
said, "before he could be sure she was the sort he could fall in love
with. I thought love at first sight wouldn't be love at all, but only
infatuation. Now I see that I didn't kn