"If he wasn't, he----" she yawned again. "And Maryborough, and Edward the Black Prince were married men." "So was Henry the Eighth," observed Ethel sententiously. "Certainly. And Napoleon, and pretty well everybody worth mentioning, and heaps not worth it. And who, pray, is John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook that he should cry off and plead Mumm? Nobody!" "He has four thousand a year," Ethel remarked in mitigation of her recalcitrant suitor's total extinction. "And a pretty taste in fox terriers," supplemented Dagmar, with an air of making every possible point in the unhappy Sharnbrook's favour. "If he jilts you----" "Impossible," Ethel cried heroically. "Fish have been known to wriggle back into the water after they were hooked, played and landed," Dagmar observed sagaciously. She turned to the window. "Here he comes," she remarked coolly. "I advise you to fling him a little farther from the bank." She raised her voice to greet the half-hearted Philander. "Here we are, Mr. Sharnbrook. Come in!" Mr. Sharnbrook thereupon came in, somewhat with an air of looking as though he would much rather not. He was a florid young man, of no strikingly apparent intellectual powers: he had straw-coloured hair parted in the middle, and a downy moustache to match. Apart from an aggressive riding suit his appearance was diffident to the verge of chronic apology. "Left off raining," he remarked, in a vain desire to meet his enemies in the open. "Has it?" replied Dagmar, indifferently doubtful. "Fancy your finding us here," she added disingenuously. "Quite a surprise," he observed, with equal dissimulation. "A pleasant surprise, I should hope. Aren't you going to speak to Ethel?" Thus prompted, Mr. Sharnbrook was fain to advance and greet the lady whom for the last week he had been dodging. "How do you do?" he said with timid cordiality. "How awfully gushing," laughed the voluble Miss Dagmar. "Of course, I'm in the way," she added significantly. "All right; I'll look out of the window." "Oh, not at all," protested the miserable Sharnbrook. "Please don't." "Oh, but I shall," she insisted. "I am interested in that delightful old market woman who has just driven in. Tell me when I may turn round." "Now," said Sharnbrook, desperately bold. "Dagmar, don't be absurd," protested her sister, with a provocative glance at her jibbing lover. "I can't see behind me," Dagmar observed casually. "None of your tricks, Dagmar," said Ethel, facing the wretched young man, and then turning her head as though to look at her sister, which manoeuvre had the intended effect of giving John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook a magnificent oscillatory opportunity. But though the way was plain the will was absent. "No, no," protested the gentleman, hanging off; "I'm up to her game. You won't catch me, Miss Dagmar. She has only got to turn her head," he pointed out confidentially to Ethel.