‘Captain Harkness,’ is the whispered reply, while she digs a hole in the gravel path with the heel of her white satin shoe.  ’I boxed him on the ear, I hardly knew what I was doing at the moment, and now I can’t think how I could do it—­you see he’d asked me to marry him.’

‘Is that the usual way you refuse your suitors?’ says Jimmy laughing.  ‘What a mercy I had not to suffer the same fate.’

‘Now if I remember rightly,’ replies Miss Seaton gravely, ’you haven’t asked me to marry you.’

‘What have I done then?’ asks Dalrymple.

‘You’ve told me you loved me, but that isn’t a bit the same, you know.’

‘No, of course not, but, dearest, you will marry me?’

‘Silly boy,’ is the reply, while she suddenly reaches up and kisses him, and then disengaging herself from his detaining arm hurries back to the house, whither he follows her a little more slowly.

CHAPTER VI

    ’’Tis true, ’tis true, ’tis pity, and pity ’tis, ’tis true.’—­HAMLET

It is breakfast time, but at present nobody has put in an appearance; whoever is punctual the morning after a ball!  The drawing-room looks dreadful, all empty and bare, and the candles burnt down in their sockets.  ‘Ugh!’ Lippa shudders as she pokes her head in, just to have a look at the place where Jimmy bade her goodnight.  She does even more, for she goes and lays her head against a place on the wall, where she remembers he leant against, and as she does so a happy contented smile hovers round her mouth, and then laughing at herself, she hurries to the dining-room.

‘What, no one down yet!’ she exclaims, gazing round the empty room.

‘Yes; I am,’ replies a voice from outside, and Paul appears at the open window.  ‘Good-morning, how early you are,’ he says.

‘Only punctual,’ replies Philippa; ’isn’t it a lovely day again.  I can’t think how the others can be so lazy.  Come into the garden, do.’

Paul acquiesces.  He has taken a great liking to Miss Seaton.  ’Did you like the ball?’ he asks.

‘Oh, so much,’ replies she, ’wasn’t it lovely.  I wish it could come all over again.’

‘Do you?’ he says.

‘Well, perhaps not quite all,’ she answers, blushing suddenly at the remembrance of her interview with Harkness.

’Which portion could you do without.  The quarter of an hour before you ran into the shrubbery and nearly knocked me down?’

‘Did I?’ is the reply.

‘Indeed you did,’ says Ponsonby, laughing, ’and you looked so fierce I was afraid to go after you and fled in the opposite direction, leaving you to vent your wrath on Dalrymple whom I had just left.’

‘I am very glad you did,’ says Lippa, with a little conscious laugh.  ‘Two’s company, three’s none.’

‘Yes,’ replies Paul, quietly, and then a pause ensues.

‘Oughtn’t I to have said that?’ asks Philippa, suddenly looking up into his face.  ’Because—­well ... you see, if you’d been there—­now, if I tell you something, promise to keep it a secret,’ this very persuasively and slipping her arm through his.