at that.

"All your eggs come from the farm, I suppose?" I hazarded.

"Yes; he won't let me keep chickens; they tear up the garden," said Bellwattle. "Bless their hearts—I think those little chickens—the tiny little yellow things—" The thought of them overwhelmed her.

Words failed, as they often did with her. She begged to be allowed to keep them next year; but Cruikshank shook his head.

"What was it you wanted to find out about the Miss Fennells?" he asked. His mind had clung tenaciously to its subject.

"Merely that I wanted to know if they lived here. I had heard them mentioned."

"They live at a house called Janemount," said Bellwattle. "I'll show it to you after breakfast."

CHAPTER VI

In an affair of this kind it is best to keep one's own counsel. I find it necessary to warn myself in this fashion, for it has ever been that women have found an easy prey in me. I know, moreover, that Bellwattle is already curious of my confusion at breakfast. What she thinks it would be impossible to say; but that she has finally made up her mind about it, of that I am certain. Such a child of Nature as she is must have instinct alive in her to her finger-tips.

In

Doubtless, she imagines I am in love. Without the shadow of a doubt, she believes a woman to be in some way concerned. For here it is that women think more elementally, more simply and, therefore, nearer to the truth than their brothers. There is nothing that a lonely man can do, but what a woman will trace therein the influence of her sex. And it is damnable to have to admit it, but she is right.

Now with Cruikshank, whose mind is for ever working in complicated theories about the grafting of roses and who, in his day at Oxford, was thought well of as a mathematician, with him and his highly elaborated intelligence, I know that I could trust myself all day. I might lead him a thousand times in the direction of Clarissa's prison, and he would never adjust the facts to a definite assumption of my behavior. It would not be so with Bellwattle.

As I left them after breakfast in the morning-room, Cruikshank said to me, "You know, I'm glad you thought of coming over for the fishing. From something I heard yesterday I believe we're going to have some fish up the stream after all."

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