it next the milkman."

"I remember perfectly. You only carried me as far as Red Bridge, in a
position the most comfortable for yourself and the most undignified for
me. You borrowed that sixpence from me and never paid me again; and we
were _both_ punished with dry bread for breakfast, because we were seen
in the milk-cart."

"The abominable injustice of my parents was of a piece with the whole
system I complain of. You will observe that we were punished, not for
disobedience, but for riding in a milk-cart, and not so much for being
in it as for being seen in it."

"Exactly, otherwise the reminiscence would be slightly irrelevant."

"Not at all. It illustrates my thorough-going consistency. I loved you
then, in spite of your detestable conduct in the matter of that cake,
and I have loved you ever since in spite of your other faults."

"Thank you."

"I suppose you would prefer some hypocrite who told you that you had
none?"

"On the contrary, I enjoy being told of my faults."

This was true. If it came to the point, Audrey would boldly offer her
own character for dissection rather than suffer conversation to be
diverted to a less interesting topic. Hardy had rather neglected these
opportunities for psychological study, and herein lay the secret of his
failure. He continued, adopting a more practical line of argument
suggested by the episode of the sixpence--

"It's not as if you were a millionaire and I a grovelling pauper. I
shall have Lavernac and two thousand a-year when my uncle, Sir
Theophilus Parker, dies." Hardy rolled out the title with a certain
proprietary unction; his cousin had no share in this enviable
relationship. "I give the old bird five years at the very worst, and
it's a moral impossibility that he should leave me in the lurch. But I
don't count on that. My own property has kept me idle all my life; but
I've sold it at last, and, as I said just now, I am going out to Canada
to farm."

Audrey blushed, and punished her blush with a frown. If she had been
playing the amusing game that Hardy suggested, it was one thing to give
the mouse a little run in order to renew the pleasures of the chase,
another thing to let him escape altogether from her paws. Hardy saw his
advantage and followed it up.

"When I told you that I had done with civilisation, I suppose you
thought it was a joke?"

"I did. Only I couldn't see the point."

"The point is this, that I'm going down to Liverpool to-morrow, a