he
_Odyssey_. 'Read it, please!'

She read it. He stopped her triumphantly.

'No, no, you can't make that long!' He pointed to one of the Greek
words.

Her fair skin flushed.

'But indeed you can!' she said eagerly. 'Merry quotes three parallel
passages. I have them in one of my notebooks.' And she began to
search her table. Mannering stopped her ungraciously.

'Of course there's always some learned fool behind every bad
reading. Anyway, what do you say to those accents?' He pointed
severely to another line of her Greek. This time Miss Bremerton's
countenance changed.

'Oh dear, what a blunder!' she said in distress, as she bent over
her pages. 'I assure you I don't often do anything as bad as that.'

Mannering was secretly delighted. His manner became at once all
politeness.

'Don't worry yourself, please. We all make mistakes.... You have a
beautiful Greek handwriting.'

Miss Bremerton took the compliment calmly--did not indeed seem to
hear it. She was already scratching out the offending words with a
sharp penknife, and daintily rewriting them. Then she looked up.

'Pamela asked me to go back to her. And I was to say, will you come,
or shall she send tea here?'

'Oh, I'll come, I'll come. I've got something to say to Pamela,'
said the Squire, frowning. And he stalked in front of her along the
library passage, his brilliant white hair gleaming in its shadows.
It was well perhaps that he did not see the amusement which played
round Elizabeth Bremerton's handsome mouth as she pursued him.

* * * * *

Tea was laid on a flagged walk under a glazed pergola running along
part of the southern wall of the house. Here Pamela was sitting
waiting, with a basket of knitting on her knee which she put out of
sight as soon as she heard her father's step. She had taken off her
hat, and her plentiful brown hair was drawn in a soft wave across
her forehead, and thickly coiled behind a shapely head. She was very
young, and very pretty. Perhaps the impression of youth
predominated, youth uncertain of itself, conscious rather of its own
richness and force than of any definite aims or desires. Her
expression was extremely reserved. A veil seemed to lie over her
deep, heavy-lidded eyes, and over features that had now delicacy and
bloom, but promised much more--something far beyond any mere girlish
prettiness. She was tall and finely made, and for the school
tableaux in which she had frequent