“I cannot find that duet anywhere,” said Marian, entering.  “What! up already, Sholto?  Where is papa?”

“I left him asleep in the dining-room.  I have just been asking Miss McQuinch whether she thought you would give me a copy of this carte.”

“That Geneva one.  It is most annoying how people persist in admiring it.  It always looks to me as if it belonged to an assortment of popular beauties at one shilling each.  I dont think I have another.  But you may take that if you wish.”

“Thank you,” said Douglas, drawing it from the book.

“I think you have a copy of every photograph I have had taken in my life,” she said, sitting down near him, and taking the album.  “I have several of yours, too.  You must get one taken soon for me; I have not got you with your beard yet.  I have a little album upstairs which Aunt Dora gave me on my eighth birthday; and the first picture in it is you, dressed in flannels, holding a bat, and looking very stern as captain of your eleven at Eton.  I used to stand in great awe of you then.  Do you remember telling me once that ‘Zanoni’ was a splendid book, and that I ought to read it?”

“Pshaw!  No.  I must have been a young fool.  But it seems that I had the grace even then to desire your sympathy.”

“I assure you I read it most reverently down in Wiltshire, where Nelly kept a select library of fiction concealed underneath her mattress; and I believed every word of it.  Nelly and I agreed that you were exactly like Zanoni; but she was hardly to blame; for she had never seen you.”

“Things like that make deep impressions on children,” said Elinor, thoughtfully.  “You were a Zanoni in my imagination for years before I saw you.  When we first met you treated me insufferably.  If you had known how my childish fancy had predisposed me to worship you, you might have vouchsafed me some more consideration, and I might have gone on believing you a demigod to the end of the chapter.  I have hardly forgiven you yet for disenchanting me.”

“I am sorry,” said Douglas sarcastically.  “I must have been sadly lacking in impressiveness.  But on the other hand I recollect that you did not disappoint me in the least.  You fully bore out the expectations I had been led to form of you.”

“I have no doubt I did,” said Elinor.  “Yet I protest that my reputation was as unjust as yours.  However, I have outlived my sensitiveness to this injustice, and have even contracted a bad habit of pretending to act up to it occasionally before foolish people.  Marian:  are you sure that duet is not on the sofa in my room?”

“Oh, the sofa!  I looked only in the green case.”

“I will go and hunt it out myself.  Excuse me for a few minutes.”

Douglas was glad to see her go.  Yet he was confused when he was alone with Marian.  He strolled to the window, outside which the roof of the porch had been converted into a summer retreat by a tent of pink-striped canvass.  “The tent is up already,” he said.  “I noticed it as we came in.”