"He has given granny the sketch of me," said Di. "He is a nice man, but after the first few days he hardly spoke to me, which I consider a bad sign in any one. It shows a want of discernment; don't you think so? Alas! we are going away this afternoon. I wish, John, you would try and look a little more moved at the prospect of losing us. It would be gratifying to think of you creeping on all-fours under a sofa after our departure, dissolved in tears." John winced, but the reflections of the night before had led to certain conclusions, and he answered lightly--that is, lightly for him, for he had not an airy manner at the best of times-- "I am afraid I could not rise to tears. Would a shriek from the battlements do?" "I should prefer tears," said Di, who was in a foolish mood this morning, in which high spirits take the form of nonsense, looking at her cousin, whose sedate and rather impenetrable face stirred the latent mischief in her. "Not idle tears, John, that 'I know not what they mean,' you know, but large solemn drops, full man's size, sixty to a teaspoonful. That's the measure by granny's medicine-glass." She looked very provoking as she stood poising herself on her slender feet on the low edge of the hearthstone, with one hand holding the stone paw of the ragged old Tempest lion carved on the chimney-piece. John looked at her with amused irritation, and wished--there is a practical form of repartee eminently satisfactory to the masculine mind which an absurd conventionality forbids--wished, but what is the good of wishing? "I must go and pack," said Di, with a sigh; "and see how granny is getting on. She is generally down before this. You won't go and get lost, will you, and only turn up at luncheon?" "I will be about," said John. "If I am not in the library, look for me under the drawing-room sofa." Di laughed, and went lightly away across the grey and white stone flags. There was a lamentable discrepancy between his feelings and hers which outraged John's sense of proportion. He went into the study and sat down there, staring at the shelves of embodied thought and speculation and aspiration with which at one time he had been content to live, which, now that he had begun to live, seemed entirely beside the mark. * * * * *