“You might do something else just as bad! Probably she’ll withdraw her permission and keep you under her thumb as she did those first weeks.”

“She may; but I don’t think she will! I think she will appreciate my confidence,” said Darsie, with a grandiloquent air, at which her companion whistled softly, his face twitching with amusement. He was much more natural and boyish in his manner than on either of the previous occasions on which Darsie had met him, and the agitation of the last few minutes seemed to have carried them in a bound past all the formalities of early acquaintance.

“Right you are!” he said briskly. “I like a straight girl. But if you don’t mind we won’t speak of it before the mater. She’s a bit nervous, and would be always imagining that the girls were going to have the same experience. You might warn Lady Hayes not to speak of it either. We’ll keep it a secret between us.”

“Just as you like! I believe,” said Darsie shrewdly, “that you’re afraid of being praised and fussed over, as you would be if people knew that you had saved my life! Men hate a fuss, but you can’t escape my gratitude. I didn’t want to die. It came over me with a sort of horror—the thought of leaving the flowers, and the trees, and the blue sky, and all the people I love. Have you ever been so nearly dead to know how it feels?”

“Once—when I had enteric at school. It was a near squeak at the crisis.”

“And how did you feel? What did you think?”

“I didn’t care a whit one way or another. I wanted to have the pillow turned. That seemed a hundred times more important than life or death; I was too ill to think... Well, thank goodness, you are not dead! I hope you’ll live for many years to be a pride and glory to—er—er—the ranks of women blue-stockings!”

Darsie looked at him sharply.

“The girls have been telling you of my ambitions! Mean of them! They might have known you’d scoff. All boys do, but I fail to see why if a girl has brains she should not use them as well as a man.”

“The inference being—”

“Certainly! I’m unusually clever for my years!” returned Darsie proudly, whereupon they simultaneously burst into a peal of laughter.

“Well, you goaded me to it!” Darsie declared in self-vindication. “I can’t stand it when boys are superior. Why must they sneer 

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