 the character as universal popularity.'

'I have not got a thousand and one important cousins!' she exclaimed, her lip curling. 'If I want to please, I must take pains, else "nobody minds me."'

He looked at her attentively, his handsome face aglow with animation.

'What can you mean by that?' he said slowly.

But she was quite silent, her head well in air.

'Cousins?' he repeated. 'Cousins? And clearly meant as a taunt at me! Now when did you see my cousins? I grant that I possess a monstrous and indefensible number. I have it. You think that at Lady Fauntleroy's ball I devoted myself too much to my family, and too little to——'

'Not at all!' cried Rose hastily, adding, with charming incoherence, while she twisted a sprig of honeysuckle in her restless fingers, 'Some cousins of course are pretty.'

He paused an instant: then a light broke over his face, and his burst of quiet laughter was infinitely pleasant to hear. Rose got redder and redder. She realised dimly that she was hardly maintaining the spirit of their contract, and that he was studying her with eyes inconveniently bright and penetrating.

'Shall I quote to you,' he said, 'a sentence of Sterne's? If it violate our contract I must plead extenuating circumstances. Sterne is admonishing a young friend as to his manners in society: "You are in love," he says. "Tant mieux. But do not imagine that the fact bestows on you a licence to behave like a bear towards all the rest of the world. Affection may surely conduct thee through an avenue of women to her who possesses thy heart without tearing the flounces of any of their petticoats"—[Pg 567]not even those of little cousins of seventeen! I say this, you will observe, in the capacity you have assigned me. In another capacity I venture to think I could justify myself still better.'

'My guardian and director,' cried Rose, 'must not begin his functions by misleading and sophistical quotations from the classics!'

He did not answer for a moment. They were at the gate of Burwood, under a thick screen of wild cherry trees. The gate was half open, and his hand was on it.

'And my pupil,' he said, bending to her, 'must not begin by challenging the prisoner whose hands she has bound, or he will not answer for the consequences!'

His words were threatening,
