shall try to wear
with a slight English accent, so as not to be too smart for a
well-regulated sheep-dog. Every one declared the honours of the aviation
week were yours, with that wonderful _Flying Fish_. I wouldn't have
believed a machine made by man could do such weird things, if I hadn't
heard all about the Glenn Curtiss experiments and successes with the
_Triad_ at home. I was proud of you. Except that man who tested the
Della Robbia parachute, you were quite the most distinguished thing in
the air, although it was really crowded--all sorts of quaint creatures
giving you their airwash. I want to have a Skye terrier now, and name
him after you. St. George was going to give me a dachshund, but they do
look so bored to tears, I think it would depress me having one about.
And, besides, I draw the line at an animal which can't know whether its
ancestors were lizards or dogs."

"Look here, Rosie," Dick began when she paused, with an introspective
look which told her that he had not heard a word she said, "there's
something I want you to do for me."

"It won't be the first time," she replied pertly. "I 'spect I'll like to
do it. But if it's anything important, better begin now, for some of my
own specially collected sheep will be drifting in to tea."

"Sheep at tea! A new subject for an artist," mumbled Carleton.

"My special ones are so shorn it would be scarcely decent to paint them,
and a few are already quite black. But they all like tea--from my hands.
It knits them together in a nice soft woolly way. And St. George will
probably stroll in with the Alpine glow of a sermon-in-the-making still
lighting up his eyes. And he will be introduced to you and drop crumbs
on my lovely Persian rug, and ask to have the gramophone started. He
loves it. Often I think our friends must go away and complain of being
gramophoned to death by a wild clergyman. So out with what you have to
ask me, my dear man, or the enemy will be upon us."

Carleton got up, with his hands in his pockets, and stared out of the
window which looked down from a seemingly great height over the
turquoise sea. He could see a train from Italy tearing along a curve of
the green and golden coast, like a dark knight charging full tilt toward
the foe, a white plume swept back from his helmet. Suddenly the smooth
blue surface of the sea was broken by the rush of a motor-boat
practising for a forthcoming race, a mere buzzing feather of foam, with
a sound like the