Between him and Honor there existed an entente cordiale which Gregor hoped in time to consolidate into a more comprehensive alliance. Honor understood him very well,--far better than he understood her, and she was not averse to an eventual acquiescence with his hopes and views as to her future. But in the meantime--partly no doubt as the result of her close intimacy with Victoria Luard--she was in no hurry to surrender her entire freedom of action even for what most girls would have considered the higher estate of an affiance with Gregor MacLean. She liked him better than any of the other young men to whom her pretty face and comradely ways proved so great an attraction. He was, as she not infrequently told him, if anything too well endowed with this world’s goods. So well that no incentive to arduous work was left him. To which he would reply that you couldn’t judge of a fellow entirely by his form at tennis or his handicap on the links. She should see him on ’Change, wrestling with beasts at Ephesus, and carrying fortunes on his bare head. At which Honor’s merry laugh would ring out and set him to soul-searching for means of approving himself to her in larger and loftier ways. Between Noel Dare and Vic also there existed a distinct feeling of something more than friendliness, which was not without its humorous aspects both to themselves and their families. They had known one another intimately for ten years. At the beginning, when they were both about of an age--between eight and nine--Noel had genially bullied her and Honor to his heart’s content, ordered them about, pulled their pig-tails when he pleased, and called them kids, and they had accepted his masterfulness as quite in the natural order of things. By the time they reached fourteen they were on a level, and Noel found his powers of command over them gone. He might order, but they only laughed and went their own way. And now, at nineteen, their positions were reversed. Victoria had developed into a young woman of advanced and very decided views, with aims in life and immense energy in carrying them out. And Noel felt himself little more than a schoolboy in her presence. As to touching her hair!--it would have been a desecration! He never dreamed of it,--not of actually doing it anyway. It was something even to touch her hand. And he sombrely said to himself at times that she was getting beyond him. And he doubted within himself, whether even the most assiduous devotion to St Mary Axe could ever place him in the position he aspired to regarding her.