d Lucille yet
more charming, delightful, and lovable. As her skirts and hair
lengthened she became more and more the real companion, the pal, the
adviser, without becoming any less the sportsman.

He had always loved her quaint terms of endearment, slang, and
epithets, but as she grew into a beautiful and refined and dignified
girl, it was still more piquant to be addressed in the highly
unladylike (or un-Smelliean) terms that she affected.

Dam never quite knew when she began to make his heart beat quicker,
and when her presence began to act upon him as sunshine and her
absence as dull cloud; but there came a time when (whether she were
riding to hounds in her neat habit, rowing with him in sweater and
white skirt, swinging along the lanes in thick boots and tailor-made
costume, sitting at the piano after dinner in simple white
dinner-gown, or waltzing at some ball--always the belle thereof for
him) he _did_ know that Lucille was more to him than a jolly pal, a
sound adviser, an audience, a confidant, and ally. Perhaps the day she
put her hair up marked an epoch in the tale of his affections. He
found that he began to hate to see other fellows dancing, skating, or
playing golf or tennis with her. He did not like to see men speaking
to her at meets or taking her in to dinner. He wanted the blood of a
certain neighbouring spring-Captain, a hunter of "flappers" and
molester of parlour-maids, home on furlough, who made eyes at her at
the Hunt Ball and followed her about all Cricket Week and said
something to her which, as Dam heard, provoked her coolly to request
him "not to be such a priceless ass". What it was she would not tell
Dam, and he, magnifying it, called, like the silly raw boy he was,
upon the spring-Captain, and gently requested him to "let my cousin
alone, Sir, if you don't mind, or--er--I'll jolly well make you". Dam
knew things about the gentleman, and considered him wholly unfit to
come within a mile of Lucille. The spring-Captain was obviously much
amused and inwardly much annoyed--but he ceased his scarce-begun
pursuit of the hoydenish-queenly girl, for Damocles de Warrenne had a
reputation for the cool prosecution of his undertakings and the
complete fulfilment of his promises. Likewise he had a reputation for
Herculean strength and uncanny skill. Yet the gay Captain had been
strongly attracted by the beauty and grace of the unspoilt,
unsophisticated, budding woman, with her sweet freshness and dignit