nce, haven't I?" said Henry. "I hope I'm a
humble enough brother of the beautiful to please you nowadays."

"You're the truest, most reliable thing in the world," said Esther; "I
always think of you as something strong and true to come to--"

"Except Mike!"

"No, not even except Mike. We'll call it a draw--dear little Mike! To
think of him going further and further away every minute! I wonder where
he is by now. He must have reached Rugby long since."

At that moment the waiter ventured to approach with a silver tray. A
telegram,--it was indeed a telegram of tears and distance from Mike,
given in at Rugby. Even so long parted and so far away, Mike was still
true. He had not yet forgotten!

These young people were great extravagants of the emotional telegram.
They were probably among the earliest to apply electricity for
heart-breaking messages. Some lovers feel it a profanation thus to
reveal their souls beneath the eye of a telegraph-operator; but the
objection of delicacy ceases if you can regard the operator in his
actual capacity as a part of the machine. French perhaps is an advisable
medium; though, if the operator misunderstands it, your love is apt to
take strange forms at its destination, and if he understands it, you may
as well use English at once.

"Dear Mike! God bless him!" and they pledged Mike in Esther's favourite
champagne. The wives of great actor-managers must early inure themselves
to champagne.

"But if you're jealous of Mike," said Esther, presently, taking up the
dropped thread of their talk; "what about Angel?"

"Of course it was only nonsense," said Henry. "I know you love Angel far
too much to be jealous of her, as I love Mike; and that's just the
beautiful harmony of it all. We are just a little impregnable world of
four,--four loving hearts against the world."

"How clever it was of you to find Angel!"

"I found Mike, too!" said Henry, laughing.

"Oh, yes, I know; but then I discovered you."

"Ah, but a still higher honour belongs to me, for I discovered you,"
retorted Henry. "When you consider that I discovered three such
wonderful persons as you and Angel and Mike, don't you think, on the
whole, that I'm singularly modest?"

"Do you love me?" said Esther, presently, quite irrelevantly.

"Do you love _me_?"

"I asked first."

"Well, for the sake of argument, let us say 'yes.'"

"How much?"

"As big as the world."

"Oh, well, then, let's have some Benedictine with th