rations, weakly agreed. And so here they were
beneath the same roof, with the addition of his second sister, the
blue-eyed Mabel, whose acquaintance we have already made.

The latter, in her soft, fair-haired, pink and roses style, was a very
pretty girl. She, for her part, could count "coup" to a creditable
extent, and among the latest scalps which she had hung to her dainty
twenty-inch girdle was that of our friend Holmes.

This--idiot, we were going to say, looked back upon that deadly,
monotonous, starved, dusty, flea-bitten coach-ride of three days and two
nights as a species of Elysium, and in the result was perennially
importuning Laurence to take a stroll down to Booyseus, "Just for a
constitutional, you know." And the latter would laugh, and
good-naturedly acquiesce. It was a cheap way of setting up a character
for amiability, he would say to himself satirically; for as yet Holmes
hardly suspected he was almost as powerfully drawn thither as Holmes was
himself--more powerfully, perhaps--only, with the advantage of years and
experience and cooler brain, he had himself more in hand.

"Instead of making a prize gooseberry of me, Holmes, as a very
appropriate item against the 'silly' season," he said one day, "you had
much better go over by yourself. You are getting into Falkner's black
books. He hates me like poison, you know."

"But that's just why I want you along, Stanninghame. While he's trying
to stand you off in the other quarter, I'm in it, don't you see?"
replied the other, with whole-hearted ingenuousness.

Holmes had stated no more than the truth. Of all the "rivals," real or
imaginary, whom the jealous George hated and feared, _qua_ rival, none
could touch Laurence Stanninghame. For by this time it had become patent
to his watchful eyes that among the swarms of visitors of the male, and
therefore, to him, obnoxious sex, at whose coming Lilith's glance would
brighten, and with whom she would converse with a kind of affectionate
confidentiality when others were present, and apparently even more so
when others were not, that objectionable personage was the said Laurence
Stanninghame.

This being the case, it followed that George Falkner, looking out on the
_stoep_ one fine afternoon, and descrying the approach of his bugbear,
stifled a bad cuss-word or two, and then exploded aloud in more approved
and passworthy fashion.

"There's that bounder coming here again."

"'Bounder' being Dutch for somebo