The girl glanced up at him, amused and surprised.

“Do you mean yourself?”

“Precisely.”

“But how could I tell?”

“I have no one to advise me.  I believe that you could do it better than any one.  I feel confidence in your opinion.”

“It is very flattering.”  She glanced up again at his earnest, questioning face, with its Saxon eyes and drooping flaxen mustache, in some doubt as to whether he might be joking.  On the contrary, all his attention seemed to be concentrated upon her answer.

“It depends so much upon what you can do, you know.  I do not know you sufficiently to be able to say what natural gifts you have.”  They were walking slowly across the lawn in the direction of the house.

“I have none.  That is to say none worth mentioning.  I have no memory and I am very slow.”

“But you are very strong.”

“Oh, if that goes for anything.  I can put up a hundred-pound bar till further orders; but what sort of a calling is that?”

Some little joke about being called to the bar flickered up in Miss Walker’s mind, but her companion was in such obvious earnest that she stifled down her inclination to laugh.

“I can do a mile on the cinder-track in 4:50 and across-country in 5:20, but how is that to help me?  I might be a cricket professional, but it is not a very dignified position.  Not that I care a straw about dignity, you know, but I should not like to hurt the old lady’s feelings.

“Your aunt’s?”

“Yes, my aunt’s.  My parents were killed in the Mutiny, you know, when I was a baby, and she has looked after me ever since.  She has been very good to me.  I’m sorry to leave her.”

“But why should you leave her?” They had reached the garden gate, and the girl leaned her racket upon the top of it, looking up with grave interest at her big white-flanneled companion.

“It’s, Browning,” said he.

“What!”

“Don’t tell my aunt that I said it”—­he sank his voice to a whisper—­“I hate Browning.”

Clara Walker rippled off into such a merry peal of laughter that he forgot the evil things which he had suffered from the poet, and burst out laughing too.

“I can’t make him out,” said he.  “I try, but he is one too many.  No doubt it is very stupid of me; I don’t deny it.  But as long as I cannot there is no use pretending that I can.  And then of course she feels hurt, for she is very fond of him, and likes to read him aloud in the evenings.  She is reading a piece now `Pippa Passes,’ and I assure you, Miss Walker, that I don’t even know what the title means.  You must think me a dreadful fool.”

“But surely he is not so incomprehensible as all that?” she said, as an attempt at encouragement.

“He is very bad.  There are some things, you know, which are fine.  That ride of the three Dutchmen, and Herve Riel and others, they are all right.  But there was a piece we read last week.  The first line stumped my aunt, and it takes a good deal to do that, for she rides very straight. `Setebos and Setebos and Setebos.’  That was the line.”