graceful girlish figure flitting
about among the rose-bushes in the neighbouring garden, I would lose
myself in pleasant anticipations of a time not too far distant when the
wall which separated us would be (metaphorically) levelled.

I remember--ah, how vividly!--the thrill of excitement with which I
heard from my mother, on returning from town one evening, that the
Curries had called, and seemed disposed to be all that was neighbourly
and kind.

I remember, too, the Sunday afternoon on which I returned their
call--alone, as my mother had already done so during the week. I was
standing on the steps of the colonel's villa, waiting for the door to
open, when I was startled by a furious snarling and yapping behind, and,
looking round, discovered a large poodle in the act of making for my
legs.

He was a coal-black poodle, with half of his right ear gone, and absurd
little thick moustaches at the end of his nose; he was shaved in the
shamlion fashion, which is considered, for some mysterious reason, to
improve a poodle, but the barber had left sundry little tufts of hair,
which studded his haunches capriciously.

I could not help being reminded, as I looked at him, of another black
poodle, which Faust entertained for a short time with unhappy results,
and I thought that a very moderate degree of incantation would be enough
to bring the fiend out of this brute.

He made me intensely uncomfortable, for I am of a slightly nervous
temperament, with a constitutional horror of dogs, and a liability to
attacks of diffidence on performing the ordinary social rites under
the most favourable conditions, and certainly the consciousness that a
strange and apparently savage dog was engaged in worrying the heels of
my boots was the reverse of reassuring.

The Currie family received me with all possible kindness. "So charmed to
make your acquaintance, Mr. Weatherhead," said Mrs. Currie, as I shook
hands. "I see," she added, pleasantly, "you've brought the doggie in
with you." As a matter of fact, I had brought the doggie in at the
ends of my coat-tails; but it was evidently no unusual occurrence for
visitors to appear in this undignified manner, for she detached him
quite as a matter of course, and as soon as I was sufficiently collected
we fell into conversation.

I discovered that the colonel and his wife were childless, and the
slender willowy figure I had seen across the garden wall was that of
Lilian Roseblade, their niece