use.

"You ought not to tire yourself," he said with a difficult tenderness.

"I _am_ so fond of dancing," pleaded Mrs. Peagrim. Recovering some of
her breath, she gazed at her companion with a sort of short-winded
archness. "You are always so sympathetic, Major Selby."

"Am I?" said Uncle Chris. "Am I?"

"You know you are!"

Uncle Chris swallowed quickly.

"I wonder if you have ever wondered," he began, and stopped. He felt
that he was not putting it as well as he might. "I wonder if it has
ever struck you that there's a reason." He stopped again. He seemed to
remember reading something like that in an advertisement in a
magazine, and he did not want to talk like an advertisement. "I wonder
if it has ever struck you, Mrs. Peagrim," he began again, "that any
sympathy on my part might be due to some deeper emotion which.... Have
you never suspected that you have never suspected...." Uncle Chris
began to feel that he must brace himself up. Usually a man of fluent
speech, he was not at his best to-night. He was just about to try
again, when he caught his hostess' eye, and the soft gleam in it sent
him cowering back into the silence as if he were taking cover from an
enemy's shrapnel.

Mrs. Peagrim touched him on the arm.

"You were saying...?" she murmured encouragingly.

Uncle Chris shut his eyes. His fingers pressed desperately into the
velvet curtain beside him. He felt as he had felt when a raw
lieutenant in India, during his first hill-campaign, when the
etiquette of the service had compelled him to rise and walk up and
down in front of his men under a desultory shower of jezail-bullets.
He seemed to hear the damned things _whop-whopping_ now ... and almost
wished that he could really hear them. One or two good bullets just
now would be a welcome diversion.

"Yes?" said Mrs. Peagrim.--

"Have you never felt," babbled Uncle Chris, "that, feeling as I feel,
I might have felt ... that is to say might be feeling a feeling...?"

There was a tap at the door of the box. Uncle Chris started violently.
Jill came in.

"Oh, I beg your pardon," she said. "I wanted to speak...."

"You wanted to speak to me?" said Uncle Chris, bounding up.
"Certainly, certainly, certainly, of course. If you will excuse me for
a moment?"

Mrs. Peagrim bowed coldly. The interruption had annoyed her. She had
no notion who Jill was, and she resented the intrusion at this
particular juncture intensely. Not so Uncle Chris, who skipped