it? a fight?"

"It's a garden party my girls are giving to-morrow afternoon," the Colonel answered. "I promised to take some of you down. Come, who's going to help me out? Wrayson? Good! Heneage? Excellent! Mason? Good fellows, all of you! Two-twenty from Waterloo, flannels and straw hats."

The little group broke up, and the Colonel was hurried off into the Committee Room. Wrayson and Heneage exchanged dubious glances.

"A garden party in May!" the latter remarked.

"Taking time by the forelock a little, isn't it?"

Wrayson sighed resignedly.

"It's the Colonel!" he declared. "We should have to go if it were December!"

CHAPTER VII THE COLONEL'S DAUGHTER

After all, the garden party was not so bad. The weather was perfect, and the grounds of Shirley House were large enough to find amusement for all the guests. Wrayson, who had made great friends with the Colonel's younger daughter, enjoyed himself immensely. After a particularly strenuous set of tennis, she led him through the wide-open French windows into a small morning-room.

"We can rest for a few minutes in here," she remarked. "You can consider it a special mark of favour, for this is my own den."

"You are spoiling me," Wrayson declared, laughing. "May I see those photographs?"

"If you like," she answered, "only you mustn't be too critical, for I'm only a beginner, you know. Here's a bookful of them you can look through, while I go and start the next set."

She placed a volume in his hand and swung out of the room, tall, fresh, and graceful. Wrayson watched her admiringly. In her perfect naturalness and unaffected good-humour, she reminded him a good deal of her father, but curiously enough there was some other likeness which appealed to him even more powerfully, and yet which he was unable to identify. It puzzled him so that for a moment or two after her departure he sat watching the door through which she had disappeared, with a slight frown upon his forehead. She was undoubtedly charming, and yet something in connection with her seemed to impress him with an impending sense of trouble. Everything about her person and manners was frank and girlish, and yet she was certainly recalling to his mind things that he had been struggling all 

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