afterwards. Motives are mixed.'

He smiled. 'I didn't know my deeply venerated relative was coming here so soon,' he went on. 'I thought she wasn't expected till next week; my brother wrote me that she had quarrelled with her French maid, and 'twould take her full ten days to get another. I meant to clear out before she arrived. To tell you the truth, I was going to-morrow.'

'And now you are stopping on?'

He caught my eye again.

CIRCUMSTANCES ALTER CASES, HE MURMURED.

'Circumstances alter cases,' he murmured, with meaning.

'It is hardly polite to describe one as a circumstance,' I objected.

'I meant,' he said, quickly, 'my aunt alone is one thing; my aunt with a friend is quite another.'

'I see,' I answered. 'There is safety in numbers.'

He eyed me hard.

'Are you mediæval or modern?' he asked.

'Modern, I hope,' I replied. Then I looked at him again. 'Oxford?'[Pg 43]

[Pg 43]

He nodded. 'And you?' half joking.

'Cambridge,' I said, glad to catch him out. 'What college?'

'Merton. Yours?'

'Girton.'

The odd rhyme amused him. Thenceforth we were[Pg 44] friends—'two 'Varsity men,' he said. And indeed it does make a queer sort of link—a freemasonry to which even women are now admitted.

[Pg 44]

At dinner and through the evening he talked a great deal to me, Lady Georgina putting in from time to time a characteristic growl about the table-d'hôte chicken—'a special breed, my dear, with eight drumsticks apiece'—or about the inadequate lighting of the heavy German salon. She was 

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