ing that Mr. Rickman disliked more than another it was being stared
at. Particularly by Miss Bishop. Miss Bishop had red hair, a loose
vivacious mouth, and her stare was grossly interrogative.

Flossie sent out a little winged look at him like a soft dark
butterfly. It skimmed and hovered about him, and flitted, too ethereal
to alight.

Miss Bishop however had no scruples, and put it to him point blank.

"Devonshire?" said Miss Bishop, "what were you doing down there?" She
planted her elbows on the table and propped her chin on her
finger-tips; her stare thus tilted was partly covered by her eyelids.

"If you really want," said Mr. Spinks, "to see that gentleman
opposite, you'll have to take a telescope." The adoring youth
conceived that it had been given to him alone of the boarders to
penetrate the mind of Rickman, that he was the guardian of his mood,
whose mission it was to protect him from the impertinent approaches of
the rest.

"A telescope? Wot d'you mean?"

"Don't you think he's got a sort of a far-away look? Especially about
the mouth and nose?"

Whether it was from being stared at or for some other reason, but by
this time Mr. Rickman had certainly become a little distant. He was
not getting on well with anybody or anything, not even with Mrs.
Downey's excellent dinner, nor yet with the claret, an extra ordered
for his private drinking, always to Mrs. Downey's secret trepidation.
She gave a half-timid, half-tender look at him and signalled to her
ladies to withdraw. She herself remained behind, superintending the
removal of the feast; keeping a motherly eye, too, on the poor boy and
his claret. Ever since that one dreadful Sunday morning when she had
found him asleep in full evening dress upon his bedroom floor, Mrs.
Downey was always expecting to see him drop under the table. He had
never done it yet, but there was no knowing when he mightn't.

Whatever the extent of Mr. Rickman's alleged intemperance, his was not
the vice of the solitary drinker, and to-night the claret was nearly
all drunk by Spinks and Soper. It had the effect of waking in the
commercial gentleman the demon of sociability that slept.

What Mr. Soper wanted to know was whether Rickman could recommend
'Armouth as a holiday resort? Could he tell him of any first-class
commercial hotel or boarding-house down there? To which Rickman
replied that he really couldn't tell him anything at all.

"Perhaps," said Mrs. Downey, peering over