a
great deal you must have in common."

"I shall call on your sister if I may. At present--I am quite content,"
he returned wishing his appointment at a fashionable club in Mayfair at
Jericho. For a dime he would let it slide and follow her to the ends of
London.

"I am sure my sister will be delighted," said Kitty cordially. Then
followed an exchange of addresses, Jack's being the name of a well-known
club. "Mother always welcomes Joyce's friends from India. They come for
a week-end and usually stay a week. The name India is a passport to our
house."

"Of course I led up to it," the minx said to Joyce on describing the
meeting. "I couldn't dream of letting him vanish and be lost to us, when
he is the most delightful boy I have ever met."

"A very naughty boy, I am afraid, though I have a soft corner for him,"
said Mrs. Meredith, who considered the recital of Jack's misdeeds unfit
for Kitty's ears.

"It is the naughty ones that are generally so nice," Kitty said with a
sigh. "They are so human and attractive."

"Because they are naughty?" Joyce was shocked to hear such radical
sentiments from little Kitty.

"It always strikes me that if they are capable of great naughtiness,
they are equally capable of much good. It is the force that I admire. It
only wants proper direction." (Which remark proved that Kitty's mind was
capable of sympathetic understanding.)

Jack and Kitty enjoyed their chance meeting so much that they missed
their respective trains repeatedly. Hers on the "West bound" platform,
and his on the "East," might have rumbled in and out of the station
beneath them, _ad infinitum_, had not Kitty recollected that she was due
to have tea with an aunt at Richmond, who was impervious to diplomacy
and dimples and with whom no excuses concerning Fate and an Affinity at
the Victoria Underground, would avail, if the kettle were over-boiled
and the tea delayed. So Kitty reluctantly bade him adieu.

"You are surely not going all that long way alone?" asked Jack, whose
young sisters travelled the length and breadth of London unescorted.

"Do you think it unsafe?" asked the minx, seeing through his idea and
encouraging the development of possibilities.

"One hears so much about girls mysteriously disappearing from London,
you know," he murmured. "I couldn't bear to hear of such a thing
happening to you, so I'll come as far as Richmond station, if I may?"

"That will be charming of you! Are you sure it will n