s!"

"Mother, they like it!" cried the girl.

"Antonia ought to be rowing, herself," said her father, whose name was
Dennant.

Shelton went back with them to their hotel, walking beside Antonia
through the Christchurch meadows, telling her details of his college
life. He dined with them that evening, and, when he left, had a feeling
like that produced by a first glass of champagne.

The Dennants lived at Holm Oaks, within six miles of Oxford, and two days
later he drove over and paid a call. Amidst the avocations of reading
for the Bar, of cricket, racing, shooting, it but required a whiff of
some fresh scent--hay, honeysuckle, clover--to bring Antonia's face
before him, with its uncertain colour and its frank, distant eyes. But
two years passed before he again saw her. Then, at an invitation from
Bernard Dennant, he played cricket for the Manor of Holm Oaks against a
neighbouring house; in the evening there was dancing oh the lawn. The
fair hair was now turned up, but the eyes were quite unchanged. Their
steps went together, and they outlasted every other couple on the
slippery grass. Thence, perhaps, sprang her respect for him; he was
wiry, a little taller than herself, and seemed to talk of things that
interested her. He found out she was seventeen, and she found out that
he was twenty-nine. The following two years Shelton went to Holm Oaks
whenever he was asked; to him this was a period of enchanted games, of
cub-hunting, theatricals, and distant sounds of practised music, and
during it Antonia's eyes grew more friendly and more curious, and his own
more shy, and schooled, more furtive and more ardent. Then came his
father's death, a voyage round the world, and that peculiar hour of mixed
sensations when, one March morning, abandoning his steamer at Marseilles,
he took train for Hyeres.

He found her at one of those exclusive hostelries amongst the pines where
the best English go, in common with Americans, Russian princesses, and
Jewish families; he would not have been shocked to find her elsewhere,
but he would have been surprised. His sunburnt face and the new beard,
on which he set some undefined value, apologetically displayed, were
scanned by those blue eyes with rapid glances, at once more friendly and
less friendly. "Ah!" they seemed to say, "here you are; how glad I am!
But--what now?"

He was admitted to their sacred table at the table d'hote, a snowy oblong
in an airy alcove, where the Ho