lf alive: we are always living here. But you never come to see us
ride, to be among the crowd. You are never at the opera. You don't talk
as those others do----"

"Montjoie, for instance," said Jock, with a strange sense of jealousy
and pain.

"Very well, Montjoie. He is what you call fun; he has always something
to say, _betises_ perhaps, but what does that matter? He makes me
laugh."

"Makes you laugh! at his wit perhaps?" cried Jock. "Oh, what things
girls are! Laugh at what a duffer like that, an ass, a fellow that has
not two ideas, says."

"You have a great many ideas," said Bice; "you are clever--you know a
number of things; but you are not so amusing, and you are not so
good-natured. You scold me; and you say another, a friend, is an
ass----"

"He was never any friend of mine," said Jock, with a hot flush of anger.
"That fellow! I never had anything to say to him."

"No," said Bice, with a smiling disdain which cut poor Jock like a
knife. "I made a mistake, that was not possible, for he is a man and you
are only a boy."

To describe Jock's feelings under this blow would be beyond the power of
words. He inferior to Montjoie! he only a boy while the other was a man!
Rage was nothing in such an emergency. He looked at her with eyes that
were almost pathetic in their sense of unappreciated merit, and, deeper
sting still, of folly preferred. In spite of himself, Locksley Hall and
those musings which have become, by no fault of the poet's, the
expression of a despair which is half ridiculous, came into his mind. He
did not see the ridicule. "Having known me to decline"--his eyes became
moist with a dew of pain--"If you think that," he said slowly,
"Bice----"

Bice answered only with a laugh. "Let us make haste; let us run," she
cried. "It is so early, no one will see us. Why don't you ride, it is
like flying? And to run is next best." She stopped after a flight, swift
as a bird, along an unfrequented path which lay still in the April
sunshine, the lilac bushes standing up on each side all athrill and
rustling with the spring, with eyes that shone like stars, and that
unusual colour which made her radiant. Jock, though he could have gone
on much faster, was behind her for the moment, and came up after her,
more occupied by the shame of being outrun and laughed at than by
admiration of the girl and her beauty. She was more conscious of her own
splendour of bloom than he was: though Bice was not vain, and he w