id a big, ruddy youth, with sunburn on his
neck and forehead.

"It isn't healthy," said Fleetwood.

"It attracts me," persisted the ruddy young man, voicing naively that
curious truth concerning the attraction that disease so often exerts on
health--the strange curiosity the normal has for the sub-normal--that
fascination of the wholesome for the unhealthy. It is, perhaps, more
curiosity than anything, unless, deep hidden under the normal, there lie
one single, perverted nerve.

Sylvia, passing the hall, glanced in through the gun-room door with an
absentminded smile at the men and their laughing greeting, as they rose
with uplifted glasses to salute her.

"The sweetest of all," observed a man, disconsolately emptying his
glass. "Oh irony! What a marriage!"

"Do you know any girl who would not change places with her?" asked
another.

Every man there insisted that he knew one girl at least who would not
exchange Sylvia's future for her own. That was very nice of them; it is
to be hoped they believed it. Some of them did--for the moment, anyhow.
Then Alderdene, blinking furiously, emitted one of his ear-racking
laughs; and everybody, as usual, laughed too.

"You damned cynic," observed Voucher affectionately.

"Somebody," said Fleetwood, "insists that she doubled up poor Siward."

"She never met Siward until she was engaged to Howard," remarked
Voucher.

"Well?"

"Oh, don't you consider that enough to squelch the story?"

"Engaged girls," mused Alderdene, "never double up except at Bridge."

"Everybody has been or is in love with Sylvia Landis," said Voucher,
"and it's a man's own fault if he's hit. Once she did it, innocently
enough, and enjoyed it, never realising that it hurt a man to be doubled
up."

Fleetwood yawned again and said: "She can have me to-morrow. But she
won't. She's tired of the sport. Any girl would get enough with the
pack at her heels day in and day out. Besides she's done for--unless she
looses Quarrier and starts on a duke-hunt over in Blinky's country! ...
Is anybody on for a sail? Is anybody on for anything? No? Oh, very well.
Shove that decanter north by west, Billy."

This was characteristic of the dog-days at Shotover. The dog-days in
town were very different; the city threw open the parks to the poor at
night; horses fell dead in the streets; pallid urchins, stripped naked,
splashed and rolled and screeched in the basin of the City Hall fountain
under the indifferent eyes