ther from it.

"Oh, please don't trouble, Mr Murchison; thank you very much!" Miss
Milburn continued, and subsided on a sofa. "Have you been playing tennis
this week?"

Mr Murchison said that he had been able to get down to the club only
once.

"The courts aren't a bit in good order. They want about a week's
rolling. The balls get up anywhere," said Dora.

"Lawn tennis," Mrs Milburn asserted herself, "is a delightful exercise.
I hope it will never go out of fashion; but that is what we used to say
of croquet, and it has gone out and come in again."

Lorne listened to this with deference; there was a hint of patience in
the regard Dora turned upon her mother. Mrs Milburn continued to
dilate upon lawn tennis, dealt lightly with badminton, and brought the
conversation round with a graceful sweep to canoeing. Dora's attitude
before she had done became slightly permissive, but Mrs Milburn held on
till she had accomplished her conception of conduct for the occasion;
then she remembered a meeting in the schoolhouse.

"We are to have an address by an Indian bishop," she told them. "He is
on his way to England by China and Japan, and is staying with our dear
rector, Mr Murchison. Such a treat I expect it will be."

"What I am dying to know," said Miss Filkin, in a sprightly way, "is
whether he is black or white!"

Mrs Milburn then left the room, and shortly afterward Miss Filkin
thought she could not miss the bishop either, conveying the feeling
that a bishop was a bishop, of whatever colour. She stayed three minutes
longer than Mrs Milburn, but she went. The Filkin tradition, though
strong, could not hold out entirely against the unwritten laws, the
silently claimed privileges, of youth in Elgin. It made its pretence and
vanished.

Even as the door closed the two that were left looked at one another
with a new significance. A simpler relation established itself between
them and controlled all that surrounded them; the very twilight seemed
conscious with it; the chairs and tables stood in attentive harmony.

"You know," said Dora, "I hate your going, Lorne!"

She did indeed seem moved, about the mouth, to discontent. There was
some little injury in the way she swung her foot.

"I was hoping Mr Fulke wouldn't get better in time; I was truly!"

The gratitude in young Murchison's eyes should have been dear to her. I
don't know whether she saw it; but she must have been aware that she was
saying what touched him, mak