ther stiffly.

"I mean that it should strike you just like that. However, it was very
lucky, wasn't it?"

"You mean I----"

"Yes, I mean you--" said Daisy, who had no intention of saving Dick from
any floundering that might befall him. Mercy is all very well, but give
us justice sometimes.

"You heard of my--my engagement?"

"I saw it in the papers. A Miss Granger, isn't it?"

"_A_ Miss Granger!" thought Dick. Everybody knew the Grangers.

"I'm sure I congratulate you. You lost no time, Mr. Derosne."

Dick stammered that it was an old acquaintance renewed.

"Oh, then you've been in love with her a long while?" asked Daisy, with
a curiosity apparently very innocent.

"Not exactly that."

"Then you did fall in love very quickly?"

"Well, I suppose I did," admitted Dick, as if he were rather ashamed of
himself.

"Oh, I mustn't blame you," said Daisy, with a pensive sigh.

Dick, on the look-out for a hint of suppressed suffering, saw what he
looked for. She was taking it very well, and it was his duty to say
something nice. Moreover, Daisy Medland was looking extremely pretty,
and that fact alone, in Dick's view, justified and indeed necessitated
the saying of something nice. Violet Granger was leagues away, and a
touch of romance could not disquiet or hurt her.

"Indeed I am anxious to hear that you don't," he said, accompanying his
remark with a glance of pathetic anxiety.

"Why should I?" she asked.

This simple question placed Dick in a difficulty, and he was glad when
she went on without waiting for an answer.

"Indeed I should have no right to. Love is sudden and--and beyond our
control, isn't it?"

"And yet," said Dick, "a man is bound to consider so many things."

"I was thinking of a girl's love. She just gives it and thinks of
nothing. Doesn't she?" and she looked at him with an appeal to his
experience in her eyes.

"Does she?" said Dick, who began to feel uncomfortable.

"And when she has once given it, she never changes."

If this last remark were a generalisation, it was certainly an audacious
one, but Dick was thinking only of a personal application. Daisy's
words, as he understood their meaning, were working on the better nature
which lay below his frivolity. He began to suffer genuine shame and
remorse at the idea that he had caused suffering--lasting pain--to this
poor unsophisticated child who had loved him so readily. Moved by this
honourable, if tardy, compunction, he ejacu