s well not to vex Mary by
telling her how--how friendly I was with Miss Medland."

"It's quite different," said Miss Scaife coldly. "In Alicia, it was
merely strange. Mr. Medland might be her father. Now, Miss Medland----"

"I never let on about you and Coxon," said Dick, who wished to change
the subject, and made his escape under shelter of Miss Scaife's
indignant repudiation.

Still humming his tune, he mounted his horse and rode to the Public
Park. At a particular turn of the avenue he pulled up and waited under a
tree. Presently a pony-carriage appeared in the distance.

"Good!" said Dick, throwing away his cigarette and feeling if his
neck-cloth were in its place. The pony-cart drew near. Dick saw with
pleasure the figure of the driver, but he also perceived, to his great
disgust, that a man was sitting by her side.

"That's the way they"--he meant women--"let you in!" he remarked.
"Anybody would have supposed she meant she drove alone. Who the deuce
has she got there?"

Miss Medland had Norburn with her, and Norburn was just explaining to
her--for he did not imitate her father's forbearance--the methods by
which he proposed to banish the evil monster, competition, from the
world. There is, however, one sort of competition, at least, which
Norburn's methods will hardly banish, and it was into the clutches of
this particular form of the evil monster that Mr. Norburn was, little as
he thought it, about to be pushed. A long period of intimacy and favour
excluded from his mind the suspicion that he might have to fight for his
position with Daisy Medland; and, if he could have brought himself to
entertain the thought of a successful rival--of some one who, coming
suddenly between, should break the strong bonds of affection well tried
by time--he certainly would not have expected to find such a competitor
in Dick Derosne. In fact, neither of the young men was capable of
appreciating the attractions of the other: Dick considering Norburn very
doubtfully a gentleman, and very certainly what in his University days
he dubbed a "smug"; Norburn regarding him with the rather impatient
contempt that such a man is apt to bestow on those for whom dressing
themselves and amusing themselves are the chief labours of a day.
Moreover, Norburn did not frequent dances, and young men who do not
frequent dances often go wrong by forgetting how much may happen between
the afternoon of a Tuesday and the morning of a Wednesday.

No do