in a neat little bit of paper, but you
would not write anything on it, because you would not like it to look
business-like. Besides, you couldn't possibly forget. And a few months
hence you will have lost your heart to some foreign young lady--I don't
know where you are going--and you would find the little packet in your
desk, and wonder who gave it to you."

"Oh, how little you know me!" Archie exclaimed, and sank back on the
turf in a despairing attitude. But a moment later he began to laugh, and
sat up again. "There _was_ a bit once," he said confidentially, "and for
the life of me I couldn't think whose it could be. There were two or
three girls I knew it couldn't possibly belong to, but that didn't help
me very far. That lock of hair quite haunted me. See what it is to have
such susceptible feelings! I used to look at it a dozen times a day, and
I couldn't sleep at night for thinking of it. At last I said to myself,
'I don't care whose it is: she was a nice, dear girl anyhow, and I'm
sure she wouldn't like to think that she bothered me in this way.' So I
consigned it to a watery grave. I felt very melancholy when it went, I
can tell you, and if my own hair had been a reasonable length I'd have
sent a bit of it overboard with hers, just for company's sake. But I'd
had a fever, and I was cropped like a convict, so I couldn't."

"You tell that little story very nicely," said Sissy when he paused. "Do
you always mention it when you ask--"

"Why, no," Archie exclaimed. "I thought _you_ would take it as it was
meant--as the greatest possible compliment to yourself. But I suppose
it's my destiny to be misunderstood. Don't you see that I _couldn't_
tell that to any one unless I were quite sure that she was so much
higher, so altogether apart, that she never, never could get mixed up
with anybody else in my mind?"

"She had better have some very particular sort of curliness in her hair
too," said Sissy. "Don't you think it would be safer?"

"Oh, this is too much!" he exclaimed. "It's sport to you, evidently, but
you don't consider that it's death to me. I say, come away, and we'll
look for this green stuff."

Fothergill smiled, but Latimer's handsome face flushed. He had made a
dozen attempts to supplant Carroll, and had been foiled by the laughing
pair. What was the use of being a good-looking fellow of six-and-twenty,
head of one of the county families and owner of Latimer's Court and
Ashendale, if he were to be se