came from. Did
you pick out Spence for an embryo lord of high finance?"

"My excuse is," replied Honora, "that I was very young, and I hadn't met
you."

Whether the lion has judged our heroine with astuteness, or done her a
little less than justice, must be left to the reader. Apparently he is
accepting her gentle lashings with a meek enjoyment. He assisted her to
alight at her own door, sent the horses home, and offered to come in and
give her a lesson in a delightful game that was to do its share in the
disintegration of the old and tiresome order of things--bridge. The
lion, it will be seen, was self-sacrificing even to the extent of
double dummy. He had picked up the game with characteristic aptitude
abroad--Quicksands had yet to learn it.

Howard Spence entered in the midst of the lesson.

"Hello, Brent," said he, genially, "you may be interested to know I got
that little matter through without a hitch to-day."

"I continue to marvel at you," said the lion, and made it no trumps.

Since this is a veracious history, and since we have wandered so far
from home and amidst such strange, if brilliant scenes, it must be
confessed that Honora, three days earlier, had entered a certain shop in
New York and inquired for a book on bridge. Yes, said the clerk, he had
such a treatise, it had arrived from England a week before. She kept it
looked up in her drawer, and studied it in the mornings with a pack of
cards before her.

Given the proper amount of spur, anything in reason can be mastered.

Volume 4.

CHAPTER VII. OF CERTAIN DELICATE MATTERS

In the religious cult of Gad and Meni, practised with such enthusiasm
at Quicksands, the Saints' days were polo days, and the chief of
all festivals the occasion of the match with the Banbury Hunt
Club--Quicksands's greatest rival. Rival for more reasons than one,
reasons too delicate to tell. Long, long ago there appeared in Punch
a cartoon of Lord Beaconsfield executing that most difficult of
performances, an egg dance. We shall be fortunate indeed if we get to
the end of this chapter without breaking an egg!

Our pen fails us in a description of that festival of festivals, the
Banbury one, which took place early in September. We should have to go
back to Babylon and the days of King Nebuchadnezzar. (Who turns out
to have been only a regent, by the way, and his name is now said to be
spelled rezzar). How give an idea of the libations poured out to Gad and