o his world, a light, tall figure of a girl,
fluttering a short petticoat. Hatless she was, brown, flushed, and her
dark hair tossing loose, and in a moment she had the snarling furious
dogs apart, each gripped firmly by its collar. Then with a wriggle
black was loose and had closed again. Inspired by the best traditions of
chivalry Benham came to her assistance. He was not expert with dogs. He
grasped the black dog under its ear. He was bitten in the wrist, rather
in excitement than malice, and with a certain excess of zeal he was
strangling the brute before you could count ten.

Amanda seized the fallen stick and whacked the dog she held, reasonably
but effectively until its yelps satisfied her. "There!" she said
pitching her victim from her, and stood erect again. She surveyed the
proceedings of her helper for the first time.

"You needn't," she said, "choke Sultan anymore."

"Ugh!" she said, as though that was enough for Sultan. And peace was
restored.

"I'm obliged to you. But--... I say! He didn't bite you, did he? Oh,
SULTAN!"

Sultan tried to express his disgust at the affair. Rotten business.
When a fellow is fighting one can't be meticulous. And if people come
interfering. Still--SORRY! So Sultan by his code of eye and tail.

"May I see?... Something ought to be done to this...."

She took his wrist in her hand, and her cheek and eyelashes came within
a foot of his face.

Some observant element in his composition guessed, and guessed quite
accurately, that she was nineteen....

2

She had an eyebrow like a quick stroke of a camel's-hair brush, she
had a glowing face, half childish imp, half woman, she had honest hazel
eyes, a voice all music, a manifest decision of character. And he must
have this bite seen to at once. She lived not five minutes away. He must
come with her.

She had an aunt who behaved like a mother and a mother who behaved like
a genteel visitor, and they both agreed with Amanda that although Mr.
Walter Long and his dreadful muzzles and everything did seem to have
stamped out rabies, yet you couldn't be too careful with a dog bite. A
dog bite might be injurious in all sorts of ways--particularly
Sultan's bite. He was, they had to confess, a dog without refinement,
a coarse-minded omnivorous dog. Both the elder ladies insisted upon
regarding Benham's wound as clear evidence of some gallant rescue of
Amanda from imminent danger--"she's always so RECKLESS with those dogs,"
a