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"No, I'd much rather not," I said firmly. 'And I greatly prefer sober language when the subject is serious."

"I'm afraid that shows you don't care very much. But I do, you see."

"What it shows is-since I mean to be as fair and candid to you as you have been to me that once I cared so much that no language would have seemed flowery and exaggerated to me. But the man I cared for like that is dead. I was only eighteen at the time. And two years ago I was engaged to some one else, but I broke it off; it doesn't matter why. So you see I am not the girlish innocent thing you have probably imagined me."

"I didn't imagine you anything of the sort, but"

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“I don't want to correct you, Tom. I like you as you are, really very much indeed." But you don't want too much of me," he said with a hurt laugh, and a blush like a boy's rose up to his forehead.

"I have never had too much of you yet," I answered, as gently as I could. "I thought we two were the best of pals, and I should simply hate to lose you. That is the simple truth."

"Thank you, Joey. I won't bother you any more at present. And if that is understood, you need not relegate me to an awful distance, need you? Can't we go on as we are!"

"Of course. Why on earth should you recede into the distance? It's I who have to do that, worse luck! Oh, look at Connie, with those immense long shears. What on earth is she up to?"

"Pruning the the gooseberry bushes, I should think. Quite the wrong time, most likely. Here, Connie, wait for us.”

She stood still, and looked at us with her placid smile. But there was inquiry in her eyes.

"No, she won't, Connie. Not this time, anyway," Tom said, with perfect simplicity.

She only gave a quick little

No, not very kind. I admit sigh, and at once took my the sense.

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'Well, sense is a very big thing when it comes to living with a person. You don't mind my saying that, do you? though I don't suppose I should admire it in a girl with little sharp eyes and a correcting voice. couldn't stand being corrected."

I

hand.

It occurred to me, and not till that moment, how very much I should like to have Connie for a sister. It actually made her brother more desirable in my eyes. But I can't explain this exactly. I only felt that they were very nice

"necessaries." My own occupied me for about one hour.

people; there wasn't a single "necessaries."
streak of commonness in either
of them, and I was sorry to
be going away.

Winderleigh was the kind of house that gave you a touch of home-sickness at leaving. It was sunny and spacious, with such a lovely outlook on the park, and such a cheerful noise of the boys' feet, running races down the long corridors. They were told not to do it at least twice a day.

But I had to get home, and in time, too, to meet Hilda at the station. I was afraid she would feel this first coming home to the lonely house rather hard; but, in truth, she was too much excited to think about that.

"Now, what do you think I have done, Joey" was her first remark. "I have taken our tickets in the Celtic, and she will sail from Liverpool in three days. Oh, indeed, it was much the best thing to do! What is there to wait for now You couldn't expect me to wait till the end of the hunting season. Of course not. And, you see, March will be over just before we land; so it will be all right."

She still retained that terror of the month of March in Canada which Nurse Evans had carefully implanted in her mind. I swiftly realised that the tickets were taken, and delay impossible. So I made no useless protests. I suppose, as Tom says, I have sense. I helped Hilda to give some last directions round the place, and to collect her multitudinous

What a nuisance it would be to have a load of possessions, and be obliged to take care of them! A house would be even worse, never without some worry to keep you indoors when you wanted to go out. The very idea of that "rather pretty place" turned me cold. Now, Hilda would revel in it.

On our last morning at home, while we were searching the borders for some early daffodils, we heard the well-known hoot of Connie's little car, and found her at the hall-door with her brother, come to say good-bye to us. Off went the two gardeners to the spring border, discussing bulbs and comparing notes. What a bore it would be to have to do that! All married people seem to decline into gardeners by some natural law.

Tom and I remained on the high terrace-walk with the yewhedge, where the sun always shines in the morning. It reminds me of Bill Gresham when I walk there, and of the day when I surprised him so much. That was rather too bad of me, of course, but it was such fun. One wouldn't have done it to quite an ordinary man. I began to compare Bill Gresham, tall and strong, and bronzed in the face by African suns, with Tom Milbanke walking beside me.

He had a light step and a good figure; he wasn't handsome, or even good-looking, but thoroughly well-bred. I liked his eyes and the way his hair

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Now, as a woman of fortune, and frightfully independent, could you bring your mind down to these two horses of yours, and what I am to do about selling them? Of course you've told Dick Hall what you wish."

We plunged into the subject of the horses, and the price they would fetch. I thought they were now worth more than I had paid for them, considering how they had improved. But Tom thought not, for the season was not far from an end, and Redwing was a whistler. I was bound to lose money over her, and the grey was not up to much weight, though sound, and a clever fencer. Of course, it ended in

my telling him to sell them for whatever they would bring.

He was quite business-like and cheerful this morning, without the least touch of the disappointed admirer about him. He tried to hurry Connie away before she was ready, and laughed when he said "goodbye."

I ought to have been pleased at this, but I wasn't. I had been thinking rather remorsefully of him since the day I left Winderleigh. If he had spoken differently that last time on the terrace, or rather, if he had looked differently, I might have said what was in my mind. But you can't do that very well in the middle of calculating prices.

Was he perhaps sorry that he had spoken so plainly to me once, only to get a refusal, and wanted me to see that it didn't matter so enormously to him after all? Quite possible. But it was not the right way of working on my feelings, if successful.

For the truth is, on that last morning I had felt in what Rosalind called " a more coming-on disposition," if only Tom had been clever enough to see it. But he wasn't.

(To be concluded.)

A DUFFER'S LUCK WITH SPINNING TACKLE.

BY STEPHEN GWYNN.

MANY people think they can fish because they have learnt to use a wet fly on small rivers and mountainy lakes in Ireland or Scotland. That was my case till-well, the age does not matter, but more than old enough to know a vast deal better. Put it that I had been fishing for more than thirty years off and on in Donegal and similar places before I condescended to try spinning. Worms for muddy water I knew and disliked; once when I did slay a splendid great white trout this way I felt a criminal. It was not a much happier moment when I first got a salmon with a prawn at Galway. But, to begin with, it is no credit to anybody to catch a salmon in Galway: nothing under four or five there is worth mentioning: to go on with, fishing the prawn as they do it there is not spinning; it is a branch of the art by itself and, as the Lydon family practise it, probably the deadliest of all. I would not trust the most experienced salmon with Michael Lydon and a Galway "shrimp." "If there is any little run of water at all, they musht take it," he said to me once, and he evidently believed it. Faithcatching is a surer thing than faith-healing. I think that was the day when I met Michael

back from the Cork Blackwater, where some ill-judging person had let him and his employer loose in July on Carysville, after the river had been only fly-fished all summer. They got close on ninety in a fortnight, "routing them out of old holes," said Michael. But neither the Lydons nor anybody else could make me enjoy prawn-fishing on that high walk at Galway, where you get a crick in your back stooping out over the swift water far away below you, and where there are so many salmon that it is an insult if you are not getting one every half-hour. My conversion to bait-fishing dates from a weekend on the Test just above Romsey. My host, so accomplished with the dry-fly that he scarcely troubled to practise his art, went off with his other guest after trout, and confided me to his old keeper, no fly-fisher, but a great performer with the minnow. What he put up was a huge prawn rigged as a spinner; and with a stout cast and lavish provision of lead, I splashed my way down half a mile of that lovely river. The sky was blue, the sun shining bright, the water like crystal, and heaven was witness how clumsily I got the thing out, when it did get out for we fished

grew; as to his voice, I think I have said quite enough about his voice. Bill Gresham's voice borders on a growl.

"Would you like these violets?" Tom inquired. "If you don't want them, I'll give them to Mrs Trent."

"How impartially kind you are! But I want them for myself. Parma violets are important to my happiness. I used to buy them in winter, at a time when I hadn't enough for my gloves."

"Now, as a woman of fortune, and frightfully independent, could you bring your mind down to these two horses of yours, and what I am to do about selling them? Of course you've told Dick Hall what you wish."

We plunged into the subject of the horses, and the price they would fetch. I thought they were now worth more than I had paid for them, considering how they had improved. But Tom thought not, for the season was not far from an end, and Redwing was a whistler. I was bound to lose money over her, and the grey was not up to much weight, though sound, and a clever fencer. Of course, it ended in

my telling him to sell them for whatever they would bring.

He was quite business-like and cheerful this morning, without the least touch of the disappointed admirer about him. He tried to hurry Connie away before she was ready, and laughed when he said " goodbye."

I ought to have been pleased at this, but I wasn't. I had been thinking rather remorsefully of him since the day I left Winderleigh. If he had spoken differently that last time on the terrace, or rather, if he had looked differently, I might have said what was in my mind. But you can't do that very well in the middle of calculating prices.

Was he perhaps sorry that he had spoken so plainly to me once, only to get a refusal, and wanted me to see that it didn't matter so enormously to him after all? Quite possible. But it was not the right way of working on my feelings, if successful.

For the truth is, on that last morning I had felt in what Rosalind called " a more coming-on disposition," if only Tom had been clever enough to see it. But he wasn't.

(To be concluded.)

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