away."

"That killing get-up can't be for me," thought he. "I'll give her the tip
she wants."

"A certain good-looking Colonel of Hussars has gone to play a match at
billiards till luncheon."

"Why that blunt and abrupt observation, _a propos_ to nothing?"

"You must excuse my sea manners. I should have used more circumlocution,
but they don't put much polish on us on board."

"No, they don't, and you boast of it, hence that phrase. You never hear a
soldier apologizing for his 'army manners'!"

"Speaks well for their modesty! Well, Kate, where are you bound for? You
are not rigged up in that way merely to coast about here."

"I meant to walk round the spring woods."

"And as Dashwood has sloped perhaps I may sail in consort. The walks
won't be swept, of course, and that dainty scarlet petticoat will look
like an old hunting-coat."

But a gardener asserting that the men had been at work since daylight,
the cousins departed on their ramble.

A gravel walk a mile round encircled the inner ring of a wood left wild,
except where rides were cut, showing vistas into the park beyond. Here
and there it was cleared into a rosary, with a summer-house, a Dutch
garden with a fountain, a glade with a fish-pond, etc. The trees were
magnificent, and many a foreign specimen was represented, while the
shimmering tints of grey-green, from their great variety, were of shades
innumerable. Sometimes the bordering turf became wider, and flowering
shrubs grew each side of the walk,--an intoxicating spot in spring, when
the wild flowers carpeted the woods, and the bird _artistes_, returning
from starring in other lands, recommenced their "popular concerts."

Even now, in winter dress, its attractions were but changed. The
lichen-covered kings of the forest revealed their bold limbs undisguised
by foliage, the feathery birch showed its delicate tracery against the
clear winter sky, and Dutton sighed as he gazed on that fair demesne, and
thought how hard it would be to give it up.

Kate's thoughts had apparently wandered in the same direction, for she
said abruptly,--"What a happy fellow you are, Harry, to be heir to all
this!" But she was thinking more of the first-rate style in which it was
kept up, and the magnificent, comfortable house, than of its picturesque
features.

"There's many a slip," said Harry, moodily, between the whiffs of his
pipe. "We all know Uncle Bromley, Kate."

"Do you know," said she, mysteriously, "I he