dered.

"Well, I can show you some keen card-play and perhaps a clever game of
billiards, besides a girl who's a great deal prettier than the dancer.
But it's four miles out of town."

Dick glanced at his watch.

"I can take you on the carrier," he said. "I've plenty of time yet."

They set off, and presently stopped at a tall iron gate on the edge of a
firwood. A glimmer of lights indicated that a house stood at the end of
the drive.

"Kenwardine will be glad to receive you as a friend of mine," Lance said;
"and you needn't play unless you like. He's fond of company and generally
has a number of young men about the place."

"A private gambling club?"

"Oh, no. You're very far from the mark. Kenwardine certainly likes a bet
and sometimes runs a bank, but all he wins wouldn't do much to keep up a
place like this. However, you can see for yourself."

Dick was not a gambler and did not play many games, but he wanted a
little excitement, and he looked forward to it as he followed his cousin
up the drive.

CHAPTER II

DICK'S TROUBLES BEGIN

It was with mixed feelings that Clare Kenwardine got down from the
stopping train at a quiet station and waited for the trap to take her
home. The trap was not in sight, but this did not surprise her, for
nobody in her father's household was punctual. Clare sometimes wondered
why the elderly groom-gardener, whose wages were very irregularly paid,
stayed on, unless it was because his weakness for liquor prevented his
getting a better post; but the servants liked her father, for he seldom
found fault with them. Kenwardine had a curious charm, which his daughter
felt as strongly as anybody else, though she was beginning to see his
failings and had, indeed, been somewhat shocked when she came home to
live with him not long before.

Now she knitted her level brows as she sat down and looked up the
straight, white road. It ran through pastures, and yellow cornfields
where harvesters were at work, to a moor on which the ling glowed red in
the fading light. Near the station a dark firwood stretched back among
the fields and a row of beeches rose in dense masses of foliage beside
the road. There was no sound except the soft splash of a stream.
Everything was peaceful; but Clare was young, and tranquillity was not
what she desired. She had, indeed, had too much of it in the sleepy
cathedral town she had left.

Her difficulty was that she felt drawn in two different ways; fo