“Of course, if you like.”     

       Charlie lit his cigarette and smoked silently for a minute or two.     

       “I call this a beastly place,” said he.     

       “Yes, horrid,” she answered, and the force of sympathy made her move the parasol and turn her face towards her companion. “But I thought,” she continued, “you came here every spring?”     

       “Oh, I don’t mind the place so much. It’s the people.”     

       “Yes, isn’t it? I know what you mean.”     

       “You can’t make a joke of everything, can you?”     

       “Indeed no,” sighed Dora.     

       Charlie looked at his cigarette, and, his eyes carefully fixed on it, said in a timid tone:     

       “What’s the point, for instance, of talking as if love was all bosh?”     

       Dora’s parasol swept down again swiftly, but Charlie was still looking at the cigarette and he did not notice its descent, nor could he see that Miss Bellairs’s cheek was no longer sallow.     

       “It’s such cheap rot,” he continued, “and when a fellow’s—I say, Miss Bellairs, I’m not boring you?”     

       The parasol wavered and finally moved.     

       “No,” said Miss Bellairs.     

       “I don’t know whether you—no, I mustn’t say that; but I know what it is to be in love, Miss Bellairs; but what’s the good of talking about it? Everybody laughs.”     

       Miss Bellairs put down her parasol.     

       “I shouldn’t laugh,” she said softly. “It’s horrid to laugh at people when they’re in trouble,” and her eyes were very sympathetic.     

       “You are kind. I don’t mind talking about it to you. You know I’m not the sort of fellow who falls in love with every girl he meets; so of course it’s worse when I do.”     

       “Was 

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