ht who wins is the best
knight; chaps that are beaten are not up to much."

"Well, they are the sort I like best; and if you had any sense you'd
like them best, too." Whereupon Elisabeth removed the light of her
offended countenance from Christopher, and dashed off in a royal rage.

As for him, he sighed over the unreasonableness of the weaker sex, but
accepted it philosophically as one of the rules of the game; and Chris
played games far too well to have anything but contempt for any one who
rebelled against the rules of any game whatsoever. It was a man's
business, he held, not to argue about the rules, but to play the game
according to them, and to win; or, if that was out of his power, to lose
pluckily and never complain.

CHAPTER IV

SCHOOL-DAYS

Up to eighteen we fight with fears,
And deal with problems grave and weighty,
And smile our smiles and weep our tears,
Just as we do in after years
From eighteen up to eighty.

When Elisabeth was sixteen her noonday was turned into night by the
death of her beloved Cousin Anne. For some time the younger Miss
Farringdon had been in failing health; but it was her role to be
delicate, and so nobody felt anxious about her until it was too late for
anxiety to be of any use. She glided out of life as gracefully as she
had glided through it, trusting that the sternness of her principles
would expiate the leniency of her practice; and was probably surprised
at the discovery that it was the leniency of her practice which finally
expiated the sternness of her principles.

She left a blank, which was never quite filled up, in the lives of her
sister Maria and her small cousin Elisabeth. The former bore her sorrow
better, on the whole, than did the latter, because she had acquired the
habit of bearing sorrow; but Elisabeth mourned with all the hopeless
misery of youth.

"It is no use trying to make me interested in things," she sobbed in
response to Christopher's clumsy though well-meant attempts to divert
her. "I shall never be interested in anything again--never. Everything
is different now that Cousin Anne is gone away."

"Not quite everything," said Christopher gently.

"Yes; everything. Why, the very trees don't look the same as they used
to look, and the view isn't a bit what it used to be when she was here.
All the ordinary things seem queer and altered, just as they do when you
see them in a dream."

"Poor little girl!"

"And n