Howard smiled and eyed her questioningly.

“Well—­I didn’t,” he replied, drily.

She laughed a little scornfully.

“Oh, I know the sort of man he is,” she said.  “I’ve read and heard about them.  The sort of man who falls in love with every woman he meet.  ’A servant of dames’!”

Howard leant back and laughed with cynical enjoyment.

“You never were further out,” he said.  “He flirts—­oh, my aunt, how he flirts!—­but as to falling in love—­Did you ever see an iceberg, Miss Falconer?”

She shook her head.

“Well, it’s one of the biggest, the most beautiful frauds in the world.  When you meet one sailing along in the Atlantic, you think it one of the nicest, sweetest things you ever saw:  it’s so dazzlingly bright, with its thousand and one colours glittering in the sunlight.  You quite fall in love with it, and it looks so harmless, so enticing, that you’re tempted to get quite close to it; which no doubt is amusing to the iceberg, but is slightly embarrassing for you; for the iceberg is on you before you know it, and—­and there isn’t enough left of you for a decent funeral.  That’s Stafford all the way.  He’s so pleasant, so frank, so lovable, that you think him quite harmless; but while you’re admiring his confounded ingratiating ways, while you’re growing enthusiastic about his engaging tricks—­he’s the best rider, the best dancer, the best shot—­oh, but you must have heard of him!—­he is bearing down upon you; your heart goes under, and he—­ah, well, he just sails over you smiling, quite unconscious of having brought you to everlasting smash.”

“You are indeed a friend,” she said with languid irony.

“Oh, you think I’m giving him away?” he said.  “My dear Miss Falconer, everybody knows him.  Every ball-room every tennis-court, is strewed with his wrecks.  And all the time he doesn’t know it; but goes his way crowned with a modesty which is the marvel and the wonder of this most marvellous of ages.”

“It sounds like a hero out of one of ‘Ouida’s’ novels,” she remarked, as listlessly as before.

But behind her lowered lids her eyes were shining with a singular brightness.

Howard turned to her delightedly.

“My dear Miss Falconer, if you were a man I should ask to shake hands with you.  It so exactly describes him.  That’s just what he is.  As handsome as the dew—­I beg your pardon!—­as frank as a boy, as gentle as a woman, as staunch, as a bull-dog, as brave—­he would have stopped a drayman’s team just as readily as yours last night—­and as invulnerable as that marble statue.”

He pointed to a statue of Adonis which stood whitely on the edge of the lawn, and she raised her eyes and looked at it dreamily.

“I could break that thing if I had a big hammer,” she said.

“I daresay,” he said.  “But can’t break Stafford.  Honestly “—­he looked at her—­“I wish you could!”