had been there. He pulled himself up short with
a sudden sensation of horror, and his hostess rose to go into the
drawing-room.

"Shall we play Halma or Ek Bahr?" she asked; "or would they be out of
order? I wish particularly to conform to all your tenets."

"Dear lady, please, we have no tenets," he protested. "Do remember that,
or you will never become what you wish. But I do not care for any
games."

"Then shall we sit down and each read a volume of the 'Yellow Book'?"

She hastened towards a table to find copies of that work, but something
in her brisk and anxious movement caused Claude to exclaim hurriedly:

"Please--please teach me Halma."

That night he went up to bed flushed with triumph.

Miss Haddon had allowed him to win a couple of games. Never before had
he felt so absolutely certain of the unusual acuteness of his intellect.

IV

Three days later, Miss Haddon and Claude Melville were feeding
chickens--under protest.

"I mean to give it up, of course," the former said. "It's a degrading
pursuit; it's almost as bad as the 'things that Jimmy does,' the things
that give him such a marvellous complexion and keep his figure so
magnificent."

She threw a handful of grain to the frenzied denizens of the enlarged
meat-safe before them, and added in a tone of pensive reflectiveness:

"Why is it, I wonder, that these actions which, as you have taught me,
are unworthy of thinking people, tend to make the body so beautiful, the
eyes so bright and clear, the cheeks rose-tinted, the limbs straight and
supple?"

All the time that she was speaking her glance crept musingly over
Claude's tall, but weak-looking and rather flaccid form, seeming to
pause on his thin undeveloped arms, his lanky legs, and his slightly
yellow face. That face began to flush. She sighed.

"There must be something radically wrong in the scheme of the universe,"
she continued. "But, of course, one ought to live for the mind and for
subtle sensations, even though they do make one look an object."

Her eyes were on the chickens now, who were fighting like feathered
furies, pouncing, clucking, running for safety, grain in beak, or, with
a fiery anxiety, chasing the favoured brethren who had secured a morsel
and were hoping to be permitted to swallow it. Claude glanced at her
furtively out of the corner of his eye, and endeavoured, for the first
time in his life, to stand erect and broaden his rather narrow chest.

Silently he reso