Ralph spoke with cheerful confidence, and Darsie listened with a sinking heart. The merry interlude of supper was robbed of its zest, as she cudgelled her brains to imagine what she was about to hear. Ralph was evidently in trouble of some sort, and his parents for once inclined to take a serious stand. Yet anything more gay and debonair than the manner with which the culprit handed round refreshments and waited on his father's guests it would be impossible to imagine. Darsie watched him across the room, and noted that wherever he passed faces brightened. As he cracked jokes with the apple-cheeked farmers, waited assiduously on their buxom wives, and made pretty speeches to the girls, no onlooker could fail to be conscious of the fact that, in the estimation of the tenants, "Master Ralph" was as a young prince who could do no wrong. For reasons of his own, Ralph was tonight bent on ingratiating himself to the full. For the first half-hour of the dance he led out one village belle after another, and it was not until waltz number five had appeared on the board that he returned to Darsie's side. "At last I've a moment to myself! My last partner weighed a ton, at least, and I'm fagged out. Got a scarf you can put round you if we go and sit out?" Darsie nodded, showing a wisp of gauze, and, laying her hand on Ralph's arm, passed with him out of the main room into the flag-decked entrance. For the moment it was empty, the dancers having made _en masse_ in the direction of the refreshment-tables. Ralph looked quickly from side to side, and, finding himself unobserved, took a key from his pocket and opened a small door leading into the patch of garden at the back of the hall. The moonlight showed a wooden bench fitted into a recess in the wall. Ralph flicked a handkerchief over its surface, and motioned Darsie towards a seat. "It's clean enough. I gave it a rub this morning. You won't be cold?" "Oh, no; not a bit." Darsie wrapped the wisp of gauze round her shoulders, and prepared to risk pneumonia with as little thought as ninety-nine girls out of a hundred would do in a similar case. The hour had come when she was to be told the nature of Ralph's trouble; she would not dream of losing the opportunity for so slight a consideration as a chill! Ralph seated himself by her side, rested an elbow on his knees, the thumb and first finger of the uplifted hand supporting his chin. His eyes searched Darsie's face with anxious scrutiny. "You didn't hear anything about me before you left Newnham?" "Hear what? No! What was there to hear?" Ralph averted his eyes, and looked across the patch of garden. The moonlight shining on his face gave it an appearance of pallor and strain. "Dan Vernon said nothing?" "No!" Darsie recalled Dan's keen glance of scrutiny, the silence which had greeted her own remarks, and realised the reason which lay behind. "Dan is not the sort to repeat disagreeable gossip."