"To keep her hand in, I suppose. She'll burn her fingers. Tell me all about it, boy, if it will relieve your mind."

"I have told you all. Mabel wants to marry Dick Weston, and I think he wants to marry her, only he's too much taken up with his airship to trouble about proposing. Wentworth Marr is wealthy and a gentleman and all that, and wants to make Mabel his wife. She likes him, but she doesn't love him. Still there's the money, you see, Vance."

"Weston is also rich," I suggested.

"Well, I know that," snapped Cannington testily, "but he's an absent-minded beggar, who lives in the clouds along with his bally airship, and won't come up to the scratch. I say," he broke off, "don't secure a paragraph for your confounded transpontine plays by running over that child."

"Little beast!" The child in question was playing "Who's across first," and I had considerable difficulty in dodging him. However, I just managed to avoid a Coroner's Inquest and swung the machine along the straight Roman road, while the escaped infant shouted insultingly behind.

Cannington giggled, but I was too much taken up with steering the Rippler through a somewhat crowded village street to tell him that he was several kinds of ass. I had known the boy since he was a forward brat at Eton, and we were intimate friends, as can be judged from the way in which he confided in me. At the present moment I was conveying him from Gattlingsands to Murchester, as he had been stopping at the former place for some days and now sought his own Mess. Previously I had motored from London to remain the night at Tarhaven, which is four miles from Gattlingsands, and thus was enabled to save Cannington a train fare. Considering that he and Lady Mabel Watton had about sixpence between them, he was duly grateful, although pointedly saucy. I was always sorry for Cannington's poverty, as he was a thoroughly healthy-minded sporting boy, who keenly enjoyed such good things of this life as he could lay hands on. A pauper commoner is an object to be met with everywhere; but a pauper lord is a more unusual spectacle. Certainly the boy was not yet knocking at the workhouse door, but, for his position, he was assuredly desperately hard-up. And thinking of these things, I made a remark when clear of the village.

"You must marry a dollar heiress, Cannington."

"O Lord! what rot. Who'd marry a pauper with a tumbledown family mansion, next to nothing a year, and several hundred 

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