added Charlie.

"You might as well say fatted dormice and snails," said Frank. "One
would think the event had been eighteen hundred years ago."

"Poor Frank! he's stuffed so hard that it is bursting out at all his
pores!" exclaimed Charlie.

"Ah! you have the advantage of your elder, Master Charles!" said
Raymond, with a paternal sound of approbation.

"Till next time," said Frank. "Now, thank goodness, mine is once
for all!"

The conversation drifted away to Venice and the homeward journey,
which Raymond and Cecil seemed to have spent in unremitting sight-
seeing. The quantities of mountains, cathedrals, and pictures they
had inspected was quite appalling.

"How hard you must have worked!" exclaimed Rosamond. "Had you never
a day's rest out of the thirty?"

"Had we, Cecil? I believe not," said Raymond.

"Sundays?" gasped Anne's low voice at his elbow.

"Indeed," triumphantly returned Cecil, "between English service and
High Mass, and Benediction, and the public gardens, and listening to
the band, we had not a single blank Sunday."

Anne started and looked aghast; and Raymond said, "The opportunity
was not to be wasted, and Cecil enjoyed everything with unwearied
vigour."

"Why, what else should we have done? It would have been very dull
and stupid to have stayed in together," said Cecil, with a world of
innocent wonder in her eyes. Then turning to her neighbour,
"Surely, Julius, you went about and saw things!"

"The sea at Filey Bridge, and the Church Congress at Leeds," he
answered, smiling.

"Very shocking, is it not, Cecil?" said Rosamond, with mock gravity;
"but he must be forgiven, for he was tired to death! I used to
think, for my part, that lovers were a sort of mild lunatics, never
to be troubled or trusted with any earthly thing; but that's one of
the things modern times have changed! As he was to be going, all
the clerical staff of St. Awdry's must needs have their holiday and
leave him to do their work; indeed, one was sent off here. For six
weeks I never saw him, except when he used to rush in to say he
couldn't stay; and when at last we were safe in the coupe, he fairly
went to sleep before we got to the first station.--Hush! you _know_
you did! And no wonder, for he had been up two nights with some
sort of infidel who was supposed to be dying. Then that first week
at Filey, he used to bring out his poetry books as the proper sort
of thing, and try to read them to me on the s