said to bring two-and-sixpence per annum into the coffers of the Quorn Arms Hotel.

"I—ah, don't know," the buckram personage answered, still staring foolishly over his horses' heads. "Anyhow, his lordship will stay at the Towers for some time as my guest."

"Curious; in his own house, Colonel," fatuously remarked Mr. Popkiss, as feeling called to make some comment on the situation.

"It is my place as long as I pay for it," snapped the Colonel loftily.

"Certainly, Colonel; no doubt, Colonel; I beg pardon, Colonel," Popkiss protested abjectly.

A few heavy drops suddenly came pattering down on the glass roof of the yard.

"It is going to rain," Colonel Hemyock observed in a tone of irritated surprise at the outrage. "We shan't get over to Babbleton this afternoon." This to his daughters, who looked, in anticipation of harm to their finery, more discontented, if possible, than before. "We had better put up till Quorn arrives. You can wait here and I will look in at the club."

There was a waiting-room adjoining the archway for the accommodation of the county people who put up their carriages at the Quorn Arms while they shopped in the town. Shown in, with much obsequiousness, by Host Popkiss, the Misses Ethel and Dagmar Hemyock here proposed to spend a tedious and highly uninteresting half-hour. The prospect did not tend to lessen the grievance they entertained against the world in general and certain unappreciative persons of the male sex in particular.

"I wonder," observed Ethel, taking up and throwing down again the current number of the Bunbury Bulletin, "if father finds Sharnbrook at the club, whether he will have the sense to let him know we are here."

"It strikes me ignorance is bliss in Sharnbrook's case," replied Dagmar cuttingly, as she stood at the window, peevishly regarding the rain.

"Oh, shut up, Dagmar," her sister returned, with a surprising lack of dignity in one so highly born. "If it clears up we might take him over to Babbleton with us."

"If he'll come," said Dagmar sarcastically.

"He must come," Ethel declared emphatically.

"He has fought shy of us since he proposed to you," Dagmar remarked maliciously.

"And was accepted," put in Ethel decisively.

"Trust you," sneered her sister. "He has the bad taste to put down the proposal to the champagne. Mrs. Wyrley-Byrde told mother so."

"All right," snapped Ethel. "Not even father's champagne ever made any man propose to you."

"A man," retorted Dagmar pointedly, "requires to be in his sober senses to appreciate me. And if he proposed under the influence of Heidsieck, I should not accept him."

"Oh, wouldn't you?" returned Ethel with somewhat over-emphasized incredulity. "Anyhow, I am not going to let John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook slip through my fingers."

"Trust you," Dagmar laughed scornfully. "You'll hold him as tight as he was when he proposed to you."

"As he says he was," Ethel corrected.

"As he must have been," Dagmar maintained unfeelingly. "After all," the amiable young lady continued, with a yawn, "who is John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook that he should be exempt from matrimony? Better men than he have submitted to it. Julius Caesar was married—and——"

"And Alexander the Great," Ethel supplied as her sister paused for another notable victim of the marriage tie.

"Yes, I think he was," pursued Dagmar indifferently.

"If he wasn't, he——" she yawned again. "And Maryborough, and Edward the Black Prince were married men."

"So was Henry the Eighth," observed Ethel sententiously.

"Certainly. And Napoleon, and pretty well everybody worth mentioning, and heaps not worth it. And who, pray, is John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook that he should cry off and plead Mumm? Nobody!"

"He has four thousand a year," Ethel remarked in mitigation of her recalcitrant suitor's total extinction.

"And a pretty taste in fox terriers," supplemented Dagmar, with an air of making every possible point in the unhappy Sharnbrook's favour. "If he jilts you——"

"Impossible," Ethel cried heroically.

"Fish have been known to wriggle back into the water after they were hooked, played and landed," Dagmar observed sagaciously. She turned to the window. "Here he comes," she remarked coolly. "I advise you to fling him a little farther from the bank." She raised her voice to greet the half-hearted Philander. "Here we are, Mr. Sharnbrook. Come in!"

Mr. Sharnbrook thereupon came in, somewhat with an air of looking as though he would much rather not. He was a florid young man, of no strikingly apparent intellectual powers: he had straw-coloured hair parted in the middle, and a downy moustache to match. Apart from an aggressive riding suit his appearance was diffident to the verge of chronic apology.

"Left off raining," he remarked, in a vain desire to meet his enemies in the open.

"Has it?" replied Dagmar, indifferently doubtful. "Fancy your finding us here," she added disingenuously.

"Quite a surprise," he observed, with equal dissimulation.

"A pleasant surprise, I should hope. Aren't you going to speak to Ethel?"

Thus prompted, Mr. Sharnbrook was fain to advance and greet the lady whom for the last week he had been dodging. "How do you do?" he said with timid cordiality.

"How awfully gushing," laughed the voluble Miss Dagmar. "Of course, I'm in the way," she added significantly. "All right; I'll look out of the window."

"Oh, not at all," protested the miserable Sharnbrook. "Please don't."

"Oh, but I shall," she insisted. "I am interested in that delightful old market woman who has just driven in. Tell me when I may turn round."

"Now," said Sharnbrook, desperately bold.

"Dagmar, don't be absurd," protested her sister, with a provocative glance at her jibbing lover.

"I can't see behind me," Dagmar observed casually.

"None of your tricks, Dagmar," said Ethel, facing the wretched young man, and then turning her head as though to look at her sister, which manoeuvre had the intended effect of giving John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook a magnificent oscillatory opportunity.

But though the way was plain the will was absent. "No, no," protested the gentleman, hanging off; "I'm up to her game. You won't catch me, Miss Dagmar. She has only got to turn her head," he pointed out confidentially to Ethel.

"Oh, she won't—just yet," the lady murmured softly. "She had better not," she added, with a meaning smile.

"We had better not," suggested the harried Sharnbrook at his wits' end, desperately determined not to compromise himself before a witness.

"Oh, just as you please," returned Miss Ethel, with a disgusted toss of her head. "If you are so frightened."

"Oh, well," he urged feebly; "I don't want to make a fool of myself."

"Oh, it is not necessary," the disappointed maiden returned with scorn. "You may look, Dagmar."

"I didn't see anything," remarked that lady, with a malicious twinkle in her sharp eyes.

"No," said Sharnbrook, manifestly relieved; "I don't see how you could. So the new Lord Quorn is coming down to the Towers," he added, eager to change the subject.

"Yes," replied Dagmar glibly, wickedly rejoicing at Ethel's discomfiture. "We are expecting him now. Of course we haven't an idea what he is like. Frightfully colonial, no doubt."

"We've heard nothing of Lady Quorn," remarked Ethel, determined not to be behindhand in chatter, and so show her indifference to the love passage that did not come off.

Sharnbrook gave a smile of superior knowledge.

"There is no Lady Quorn," he said.

The effect of his announcement was startling. "No Lady Quorn?" the eager sisters cried in chorus, their expressions indicating design tempered with incredulity.

"Quorn's a bachelor," Sharnbrook maintained, beginning to see light behind the dark cloud which for the past fortnight had hung over him.

Miss Ethel turned to her sister with indignant