yro quietly.

"Doin' much business abroad?" pursued the other.

"No; I'm not here on business. It's a pleasure trip," explained the
victim pleasantly.

"Gents' furnishin's must be lookin' up. Go every year?" Mr. Sperry was
looking for an opening.

"This is my first trip."

"Your first!" cried the other. "Why, I bin across fifteen times." He
conceived the sought-for opening to be before him. "So you're out
cuttin' a dash. A sort of haberdash, hey? Haw--haw--haw!" He burst into
a paroxysm of self-applausive mirth over his joke, in which a couple of
satellites near at hand joined. "Haw--haw--haw!" he roared, stimulated
by their support.

The Tyro slowly turned a direct gaze upon his tormentor. "The Western
variety of your species," he observed pensively, "pronounce that
'hee-haw' rather than 'haw-haw.'"

There was a counter-chuckle, with Judge Enderby leading. Mr. Sperry's
mirth subsided. "Say, what's the chap mean?" he appealed to Journay.

"Oh, go eat a thistle," returned that disgusted youth. "He means you're
an ass, and you are. Serves you right."

Sperry rose and hulked out of the circle. "I'll see you on deck--later,"
he muttered to the Tyro in passing.

Little Miss Grouch turned bright eyes upon him. "Mr. Daddleskink is not
addicted to haberdashery exclusively. He also daddles in--"

"Real estate," put in the Tyro.

"Fancy his impudence!" She turned to Lord Guenn. "He wants to buy _my_
house."

"Not the house on the Battery?" said one of the court.

"I say, you know," put in Lord Guenn. "I have a sort of an interest in
that house. Had a great-grandfather that was taken in there when he was
wounded in one of the colonial wars. The Revolution, I believe you call
it."

"Then I suppose you will put in a claim, too, Bertie," said Miss Grouch,
and the familiar friendliness of her address caused the Tyro a little
unidentified and disconcerting pang.

"Boot's on the other leg," replied the young Englishman. "The house has
a claim on us, for hospitality. We paid it in part to old Spencer
Forsyth--he was my revered ancestor's friend--when he came over to
England after the war. Got a portrait of him now at Guenn Oaks.
Straight, lank, stern, level-eyed, shrewd-faced old boy--regular
whackin' old Yankee type. I beg your pardon," he added hastily.

"What for?" asked the Tyro with bland but emphatic inquiry.

Lord Guenn was not precisely slug-witted.

"Stupid of me," he confessed heartily. "What should an