years more
would see a like development in their elder son, a remark which
bordered on absurdity; for Johnny was but eight, and ten years are not
a few years to a lady of twenty-eight, whatever they may seem to a man
of forty-four.

Presently Harry, shaking himself free from an entangling group of the
Vicarage girls, joined his father, and the two came across to Mrs.
Mortimer.

She was a favorite of old Sterling's, and he was proud to present his
handsome son to her. She listened graciously to his jocosities,
stealing a glance at Harry when his father called him "a good boy."
Harry blushed and assumed an air of indifference, tossing his hair back
from his smooth forehead, and swinging his racket carelessly in his
hand. The lady addressed some words of patronizing kindness to him,
seeking to put him at his ease. She seemed to succeed to some extent,
for he let his father and her husband go off together, and sat down by
her on the bench, regardless of the fact that the Vicarage girls were
waiting for him to make a fourth.

He said nothing, and Mrs. Mortimer looked at him from under her long
lashes; in so doing she discovered that he was looking at her.

"Aren't you going to play any more, Mr. Sterling?" she asked.

"Why aren't you playing?" he rejoined.

"My husband says I play too badly."

"Oh, play with me! We shall make a good pair."

"Then you must be very good."

"Well, no one can play a hang here, you know. Besides I'm sure you're
all right, really."

"You forget my weight of years."

He opened his blue eyes a little, and laughed. He was, in fact,
astonished to find that she was quite a young woman. Remembering old
Mortimer and the babies, he had thought of her as full middle-aged.
But she was not; nor had she that likeness to a suet pudding, which his
newborn critical faculty cruelly detected in his old friends, the
Vicarage girls.

There was one of them--Maudie--with whom he had flirted in his
holidays; he wondered at that, especially when a relentless memory told
him that Mrs. Mortimer must have been at the parties where the thing
went on. He felt very much older, so much older that Mrs. Mortimer
became at once a contemporary. Why, then, should she begin, as she now
did, to talk to him, in quasi maternal fashion, about his prospects?
Men don't have prospects, or, anyhow, are spared questionings thereon.

Either from impatience of this topic, or because, after all, tennis was
not to be n