him was that he would not lead her enough--would not tell
her precisely enough what she was to do with herself.

CHAPTER V.

While she and Hallin were sitting thus, momentarily out of tune with
each other, the silence was suddenly broken by a familiar voice.

"I say, Hallin--is this all right?"

The words came from a young man who, having knocked unheeded, opened the
door, and cautiously put in a curly head.

"Frank!--is that you? Come in," cried Hallin, springing up.

Frank Leven came in, and at once perceived the lady sitting in the
window.

"Well, I _am_ glad!" he cried, striding across the room and shaking
Hallin's hand by the way. "Miss Boyce! I thought none of your friends
were ever going to get a sight of you again! Why, what--"

He drew back scanning her, a gay look of quizzing surprise on his fair
boy's face.

"He expected me in cap and apron," said Marcella, laughing; "or means to
pretend he did."

"I expected a sensation! And here you are, just as you were, only twice
as--I say, Hallin, doesn't she look well!"--this in a stage aside to
Hallin, while the speaker was drawing off his gloves, and still studying
Marcella.

"Well, _I_ think she looks tired," said Hallin, with a little attempt at
a smile, but turning away. Everybody felt a certain tension, a certain
danger, even in the simplest words, and Miss Hallin's call to supper was
very welcome.

The frugal meal went gaily. The chattering Christchurch boy brought to
it a breath of happy, careless life, to which the three
others--over-driven and over-pressed, all of them--responded with a kind
of eagerness. Hallin especially delighted in him, and would have out all
his budget--his peacock's pride at having been just put into the
'Varsity eleven, his cricket engagements for the summer, his rows with
his dons, above all his lasting amazement that he should have just
scraped through his Mods.

"I thought those Roman emperors would have done for me!" he declared,
with a child's complacency. "_Brutes!_ I couldn't remember them. I
learnt them up and down, backwards and forwards--but it was no good;
they nearly dished me!"

"Yet it comes back to me," said Hallin, slily, "that when a certain
person was once asked to name the winner of the Derby in some obscure
year, he began at the beginning, and gave us all of them, from first to
last, without a hitch."

"The winner of the _Derby_!" said the lad, eagerly, bending forward with
his hands on