She could forgive Miss Skene her tantrums, and even, apparently, her desertion, but not so readily could she forgive the imposition of Sir Andrew, who had made her look ridiculous to herself. Even yet her face would burn when she thought of her indiscretion. It was no excuse for her, she knew, that she should have chattered to him only in her ignorance of his identity, but the offence began with him. "It was too bad!" she declared, "and you can tell him so from me. I abominate the kind of joke that starts with falsehood."

"But it wasn't exactly falsehood with my cousin," protested Norah. "He was Tom Dunn for the occasion, and if you knew him as well as I do, you would understand that he kept up the character for the sake of Mrs Nish, whose post-hiring business would suffer badly if it were generally known that she let jocular amateurs drive her landau. Why are you so unforgiving?"

"I suppose it's just my vanity," confessed Penelope. "When I think of it I feel so-so small. I was taken at a disadvantage; it was cowardly. And I hope I'll never meet him, for I'll tell him so."

For three or four weeks she was certainly not to meet him, but still he got to know her day by day more intimately; day by day with more surprise and curiosity. Norah would come from the patient's bedroom betraying her amusement at some new phase of that rebel nature; Captain Cutlass had a full report of everything. "Why!" he would he would cry,

I'm sorry

"she's splendid! she won't forgive me, but she's right. When will she be able to be out? I'm all impatience.

"Tohk! tchk! Andrew," said Amelia in despair. "A saucy- " but she suddenly checked herself, at the disapproval of his countenance.

"What are her imperfections?" he demanded from his cousin. "You've been telling me of nothing but her merits." "I didn't say she had any imperfections," answered Norah, smiling.

"Good Lord!" said Captain Cutlass hurriedly, "I hope she's not inhuman. But no: I remember! At least she has a fiery temper; I heard it in her very first words to me on Duntryne quay, and I saw it in her eyes when I made to help her to her feet on the riverside. But after all, temper's hardly an imperfection. There's a frightful kind of tame submission in some of your sex compared with which the violence of a virago is a virtue. There must be something else-ah! I remember: I remember: a strained, high, unrefined inflection in her voice, not quite pleasant, when she was contradictory. Women should have quiet, sweet, level voices, even when they're furious."

"I see nothing wrong with her voice," protested Norah. "It seems to me rather pretty and musical."

"Probably; but you never had the chance, perhaps, to hear it with the piccolo-stop out. I thought it pretty most of the time too,—at least it had possibilities in it, with a little training. Why women should

learn to sing before they have learned to speak is a thing I could never understand. They're speaking all the time, and they're only sometimes singing. They might as well learn to dance before they have learned to walk."

apt to be followed by the same regrets that it brings to common mortals. Her annoyance with you is wounded pride; she feels that you had her at a disadvantage when she was indiscreet."

"Yes," said Sir Andrew, "that was another thing. Even if I had been Dunn, she was indiscreet. She hurt me a little twice-by a reference

other matter. Never mind! I could never have been so indiscreet as that myself, nor you. But of course we've had advantages."

'I

"Oh, she's imprudent—” "I'm glad to hear it," said Sir Andrew, laughing. "Prudence is nearly always fear. was never afraid of anything -except myself,' she said when my horses jibbed, and I could believe her. She's a perfect Stoic. You've been trying to show me her imperfections, and

"I haven't," protested Norah. -I find they're all virtues. She's independent, contradictory, self-willed, confident in her own convictions, spontaneous, with no duplicity, clever. I believe a year of your society and the run of your book-shelves would make her perfect."

"But that would be to spoil her, wouldn't it, Andy?" said Norah mockingly. "You wouldn't have Penelope inhuman?"

"You don't exactly catch what I mean," said Captain Cutlass, looking with abstraction at his cousin's profile and a little curl of hair upon her temple.

For a month the room where

"That's nice!" she said. "But I suppose the wind's north-west at present."

re

He was charmed; he had never before met any one quite like her, except in some spects his cousin. She made him think of the free wild moor and morning walks there, for folk to Captain Cutlass often had some spirit of a certain place and weather. For half-an-hour they sat together in the forenoon sun; Miss Amelia, disapproving at a window, wondered at what they laughed so much. Penelope put all his whimsical ideas to the test of prose, like another Jamie Birrell; he delighted in her spirit of dissent, in one who spoke without reserve, with the bold unconsciousness of childhood.

"I envy Miss Skene the stimulation of your contradic

tion," he declared, and a shadow came to her face.

"Miss Skene," she replied, "will have to dispense with that sort of stimulus in future; I'm not going back to her. I told her so before she left, and she probably doesn't believe it, but I always ride when I saddle, as my father says."

"Norah!" he cried, running into the house, and his cousin came hurriedly to see what caused this peremptory manner.

"Do you know," he asked eagerly, "that Penelope is not going back to your friend Miss Skene?"

"Idon't," said Norah, smiling. "She seems to have taken you into her confidence again pretty readily, considering the way you have already abused it."

"You must keep her here!" he went on impetuously.

"In what capacity?" asked his cousin quietly.

"You are as much in need of a companion as Miss Skene."

"Not quite," she replied. "I've always you and Aunt Amelia, and there's often Reginald. I like Penelope immensely, she's so like myself in some respects, and seems sometimes to remind me of a sister I never had. But I couldn't engage the girl who saved my life to put up my hair, even if I didn't find it better for my health to do so for myself.'

"If you don't make some arrangement whereby she'll stay, I'll marry her, offhand, myself!" said Captain Cutlass.