PROSPER.

Cecil came down the next morning looking very pretty after her ducking.
Vivian asked her how she was with his general air of calm courtesy,
helped her to some cold pheasant, and applied himself to his breakfast
and some talk with a sporting man about the chances of the frost
breaking up.

Horace, who looked upon himself as a preux chevalier, had had his left
arm put in a sling on the strength of a bruise as big as a
fourpenny-piece, and appeared to consider himself entitled to Cecil's
eternal gratitude and admiration for having gone the length of wetting
his coat sleeves for her.

"Do you like music by starlight?" he whispered, with a self-conscious
smile, after a course of delicate attentions throughout breakfast.

Syd fixed his eyes on Cecil's, steadily but impassively. The color rose
into her face, and she turned to Cos with a mischievous laugh.

"Very much, if--I am not too sleepy to hear it; and it isn't a cornet
out of tune."

"How cruel!" murmured Horace, as he passed her coffee. "You shouldn't
criticise so severely when a fellow tries to please you."

"That poor dear girl really thinks I turned out into the snow last night
to give her that serenade," observed Cos, with a languid laugh, when we
were alone in the billiard-room. "Good, isn't it, the idea of _my_
troubling myself?"

"Whose cracked cornet was it, then, that made that confounded row last
night?" I asked.

Horace laughed again; it was rarely he was so highly amused at anything:
"It was Cleante's, to be sure. He don't play badly when his hands are
not numbed, poor devil! Of course he made no end of a row about going
out into the snow, but I made him do it. I knew Cecil would think it was
I. Women are so vain, poor things!"

It was lucky I alone was the repository of his confidence, for if Vivian
had chanced to have been in the billiard-room, it is highly probable he
would then and there have brained his cousin with one of the cues.

Happily he was out of the reach of temptation, in the stables, looking
after Qui Vive, who had to "bide in stall," as much to that gallant
bay's disquiet as to her owner's; for I don't know which of the two
best loves a burst over a stiff country, or a fast twenty minutes up
wind alone with the hounds when they throw up their heads.

To the stables, by an odd coincidence, Cecil, putting the irresistible
black hat on the top of her chestnut braids, prevailed on Blanche to
escort her, vowing (which w