me.

"I suppose you've never had a sweetheart before?" asked Miss Sellars, as
we turned into the Blackfriars Road.

I admitted that this was my first experience.

"I can't a-bear a flirty man," explained Miss Sellars. "That's why I
took to you from the beginning. You was so quiet."

I began to wish that nature had bestowed upon me a noisier temperament.

"Anybody could see you was a gentleman," continued Miss Sellars. "Heaps
and heaps of hoffers I've had--_h_undreds you might almost say. But what
I've always told 'em is, 'I like you very much indeed as a friend, but
I'm not going to marry any one but a gentleman.' Don't you think I was
right?"

I murmured it was only what I should have expected of her.

"You may take my harm, if you like," suggested Miss Sellars, as we
crossed St. George's Circus; and linked, we pursued our way along the
Kennington Park Road.

Fortunately, there was not much need for me to talk. Miss Sellars was
content to supply most of the conversation herself, and all of it was
about herself.

I learned that her instincts since childhood had been toward gentility.
Nor was this to be wondered at, seeing that her family--on her mother's
side, at all events,--were connected distinctly with "the _h_ighest in
the land." _Mesalliances_, however, are common in all communities, and
one of them, a particularly flagrant specimen--her "Mar" had, alas!
contracted, having married--what did I think? I should never guess--a
waiter! Miss Sellars, stopping in the act of crossing Newington Butts to
shudder at the recollection of her female parent's shame, was nearly run
down by a tramcar.

Mr. and Mrs. Sellars did not appear to have "hit it off" together. Could
one wonder: Mrs. Sellars with an uncle on the Stock Exchange, and Mr.
Sellars with one on Peckham Rye? I gathered his calling to have been,
chiefly, "three shies a penny." Mrs. Sellars was now, however, happily
dead; and if no other good thing had come out of the catastrophe, it had
determined Miss Sellars to take warning by her mother's error and avoid
connection with the lowly born. She it was who, with my help, would lift
the family back again to its proper position in society.

"It used to be a joke against me," explained Miss Sellars, "heven when
I was quite a child. I never could tolerate anything low. Why, one day
when I was only seven years old, what do you think happened?"

I confessed my inability to guess.

"Well, I'll tell you," said