But with all his desire to get up a small excitement, wherewith to while away the hours when he could not be shooting in the forest of Piron, Mr. Charteris was not so foolish as to commit himself where there appeared no chance of remunerating his trouble; and so he gave me up as a bad job, and, with a gesture of impatience, resumed the study of his French novel. But I would not leave one stone unturned by which I thought to convince him that he was utterly mistaken in thinking I had ever given a second thought to his heartless desertion of me. ‘How is your cousin Fred Stephenson, Mr. Charteris?’ I asked, with a jaunty air. ‘Oh, he’s well enough,’ he replied sulkily. ‘I thought you were going to ask him over here for a day. I wish you would—I should like to see him again. He seemed such a nice pleasant boy. I took quite a fancy to him.’ ‘And I suppose you are afraid, if you don’t see him soon, that your fancy will evaporate. It is “out of sight, out of mind” with you, Miss Marsh, like the generality of women.’ ‘Well, you wouldn’t have me in the minority, would you? I always stick up for my sex, and have no desire to fare better than the rest of them. Since I am a woman, I’ll be one all over. I don’t like half and half animals.’ ‘You need have no fear of being mistaken for anything else, Miss Marsh. You have all the sex’s attributes strongly marked upon you, even to asserting the right to change your mind as often as you choose.’ ‘I am so glad!’ I said gleefully. ‘I like to claim my privileges, and a masculine woman never gets any. But what has all this to do with your cousin Fred Stephenson?’ ‘Why, that as you have taken a fancy to him, I don’t think I shall ask him over here. I am a sort of guardian of his whilst abroad, and he is of a susceptible age when the heart is more readily affected by unkindness and neglect than at any other.’ ‘And you think I shall be unkind to the boy.’ ‘I think you will be too kind, and then you will forget all about him. Some carroty-haired creature will come in the way’—this was a hit at poor Charlie Sandilands, whose hair, _en passant_, was not a bit more carroty than his own—‘and then Fred will be forgotten and left out in the cold, and will be as little able, perhaps, to read the meaning of the riddle as some other of your friends have been who have suffered a similar neglect at your fair hands.’ This was very pretty fencing, but I felt I must put a stop to it. It was becoming ridiculous to me, which was proof sufficient how entirely it had lost its sting.