f you found a rogue elephant
on your croquet-lawn; but he was shy and diffident with women. I told
my mother privately that he was an absolute woman-hater; so, of course,
she laid herself out to flirt all she knew, which isn't a little."

"And was the gentleman responsive?"

"I hear he told some one at the club that he was looking out for a
Colonial job, with plenty of hard work, for a young friend of his, so I
gather that he has some idea of marrying into the family."

"You seem destined to be the victim of the reformation, after all."

Clovis wiped the trace of Turkish coffee and the beginnings of a smile
from his lips, and slowly lowered his dexter eyelid. Which, being
interpreted, probably meant, "I DON'T think!"

TOBERMORY

It was a chill, rain-washed afternoon of a late August day, that
indefinite season when partridges are still in security or cold
storage, and there is nothing to hunt--unless one is bounded on the
north by the Bristol Channel, in which case one may lawfully gallop
after fat red stags. Lady Blemley's house-party was not bounded on the
north by the Bristol Channel, hence there was a full gathering of her
guests round the tea-table on this particular afternoon. And, in spite
of the blankness of the season and the triteness of the occasion, there
was no trace in the company of that fatigued restlessness which means a
dread of the pianola and a subdued hankering for auction bridge. The
undisguised openmouthed attention of the entire party was fixed on the
homely negative personality of Mr. Cornelius Appin. Of all her guests,
he was the one who had come to Lady Blemley with the vaguest
reputation. Some one had said he was "clever," and he had got his
invitation in the moderate expectation, on the part of his hostess,
that some portion at least of his cleverness would be contributed to
the general entertainment. Until tea-time that day she had been unable
to discover in what direction, if any, his cleverness lay. He was
neither a wit nor a croquet champion, a hypnotic force nor a begetter
of amateur theatricals. Neither did his exterior suggest the sort of
man in whom women are willing to pardon a generous measure of mental
deficiency. He had subsided into mere Mr. Appin, and the Cornelius
seemed a piece of transparent baptismal bluff. And now he was claiming
to have launched on the world a discovery beside which the invention of
gunpowder, of the printing-press, and of steam