he soft satin. The suggestion that lay in the colour was entirely
lost upon him, however: if asked to name it he would doubtless have
said "purplish." How he wished that he might have escorted her into
the dining room, but Mrs. de Tracy was his portion as usual, and
Robinette was waiting for Carnaby, who seemed unaccountably slow.

"Your arm, Middy, when you are quite ready," she said to him at last.
Carnaby's extraordinary unreadiness seemed to arise from his trying to
smuggle some object up his sleeve. This proved, a few moments later,
to be a bundle of lavender sticks tied with violet ribbon that he had
discovered in his bureau drawer. He laid it by Robinette's plate with
a whispered "My compliments."

"What does your cousin want that bunch of lavender for, at the table?"
Mrs. de Tracy enquired.

"She likes lavender anywhere, ma'am," Carnaby said with a wink on the
side not visible by his grandmother. "It's a favourite of hers."

Robinette could only be thankful that Lavendar was occupied in a
_sotto voce_ discussion of wine with Bates, and she was able to
conceal the bundle of herbs before his eyes met hers, for the fury she
felt against her precious young kinsman at that moment she could have
expressed only by blows.

Dinner seemed interminably long. Robinette, for more reasons than one,
was preoccupied; Lavendar made few remarks, and Carnaby was possessed
by a spirit of perfectly fiendish mischief, saying and doing
everything that could most exasperate his grandmother, put her guests
to the blush, and shock Miss Smeardon.

But at last Mrs. de Tracy rose from the table, and the ladies followed
her from the room, leaving Lavendar to cope alone with Carnaby.

"My fair American cousin is more than usually lovely to-night, eh, Mr.
Lavendar?" the boy said, with his laughable assumption of a man of the
world.

"There, my young friend; that will do! you're talking altogether too
much," said Lavendar, as he poured himself out a glass of wine and sat
down by the open window to drink it. Carnaby, perhaps not unreasonably
offended, lounged out of the room, and left the older man to his own
meditations.

Robinette in the meantime went into the drawing room with her aunt,
and they sat down together in the dim light while Miss Smeardon went
upstairs to write a letter.

"Aunt de Tracy," Robinette began, "I was calling on Mrs. Prettyman
just after you had been with her this afternoon, and do you know the
dear old soul