g that exhilarates increases one's vitality.
Why don't you make your husband teach you? He seems to know all about
it."

"Yes," Beth answered, smiling; "but I shouldn't think teaching me is
at all in his line. Why don't you dance yourself?"

"Oh, I am far too clumsy," he said good-naturedly. "My wife says if I
could even learn to move about a room without getting in the way and
upsetting things, it would be something."

"Is she here to-night?" Beth asked.

"No, she was not feeling up to it," he answered. "She tired herself in
the garden this afternoon, helping me to bud roses."

"Oh, can you bud roses?" Beth exclaimed. "I should so like to know how
it is done."

"I'll show you with pleasure."

"Will you really?" said Beth. "How kind of you."

"Not at all. Let me see, when will you be at home? We mustn't lose any
time, or it will be too late in the year."

"I'm pretty nearly always at home," Beth said.

"Then if I came to-morrow morning would that be convenient?"

"Quite; and I hope you will stay lunch," Beth answered.

Dan returned to the ball-room just then, and, on seeing who was with
her, he immediately joined them; but Sir George only stayed long
enough to exchange greetings politely.

"You seem to get on very well with Galbraith," Dan observed.

"Don't you like him?" Beth asked in surprise, detecting a note of
enmity in his voice.

"I haven't had much chance," he said bitterly. "He doesn't play the
agreeable to me as he does to you."

Beth missed the drift of this remark in considering the expression
"play the agreeable," which was unpleasantly suggestive to her of
under-bred gentility.

"You will be able to give him an opportunity to-morrow then," she
said, "if you are in at lunch-time, for he is coming to show me how to
bud roses, and I have asked him to stay."

"Have you, indeed?" Dan exclaimed, obviously displeased, but why or
wherefore Beth could not conceive. "I hope to goodness there's
something to eat in the house," he added upon reflection, fussily.

"There is as much as there always is," Beth placidly rejoined.

"Well, that's not enough then. Just think what a man like that has on
his own table!"

"A man like that won't expect our table to be like his."

"You'd better make it appear so for once then, or you'll be having our
hospitality criticised as I heard the Barrack fellows criticise Mrs.
Jeffery's the other day. A couple of them called about lunch-time, and
she asked them