as her most willing and
obedient pupil, and that perhaps if he could look into her heart he
would find that she did care, and very much more than for the wealth
and the hypothetical lord.

Nature seemed to suggest, too, that Isobel's thoughts were with him at
that moment; that she was uncommonly near to him in soul if not in
body; that she was thinking about him as he was thinking about her, and
saying much the same things to herself as he was saying to himself.
Indeed, he even began a whispered conversation with her, of a sort he
would not have ventured upon had she been there, pausing between the
sentences for her answers, which, as he imagined them, were very
satisfactory indeed.

By degrees, however, question and answer grew less frequent and further
apart as he dozed off and finally sank into a deep sleep. So deep was
it, indeed, that he was awakened only by the clamour of the breakfast
bell, and when he arrived downstairs, to be confronted by some cold
bacon on an uncovered dish, his father had departed to the Diocesan
Conference. Well, this fact had its consolations, and bacon, however
cold, with contentment is better than bacon hot where contention is.

So he ate it and anything else he could find with appetite, and then
went upstairs to shave and do his hair nicely and to put on a new suit
of clothes, which he considered became him. Also, as he had still
three-quarters of an hour to spare, he began to write a little poem
about Isobel, which was a dismal failure, to tell the truth, since he
could think of no satisfactory rhyme to her name, except "O well!"
which, however he put it, sounded silly.

At last, rather too early, he threw the sheet of paper into the
fireplace and started, only to find that although it still lacked a
quarter of an hour to eleven, Isobel was already seated on that tree.

"What have you been doing to yourself?" she asked, "putting on those
smart London clothes? I like the old grey things you had on last night
ever so much better, and I wanted you to climb a tree to get me some
young jackdaws. And--good gracious! Godfrey, your head smells like a
whole hairdresser's shop. Please come to the other side, to leeward of
me."

He murmured something about liking to look tidy, and then remarked that
she seemed rather finely dressed herself.

"It's only my Mexican hat," she answered, touching the big sombrero,
woven from the finest Panama grass, which she was wearing, "and the
necklace is