"Yes, we struck up acquaintance on that occasion. Poor Ralph! He was a fine fellow, whatever his faults, and, mind you, my impression is that in the last affair it was a case of clapping the saddle on the wrong horse, that he was screening somebody else, and allowed the blame to fall on himself rather than `peach.' It was magnificent, but--stark idiotic." "He has a very, fine face," said Yseulte, again taking up the photograph and examining it thoughtfully. The fact that he had suffered at the hands of his slippery cousin was quite enough to enlist all her sympathies in behalf of the romantic scapegrace. "Yes, it is. You know I am not given to indiscriminate eulogium, but without hesitation I think Ralph Vallance was about the finest specimen of manhood I ever saw." "What has become of him now?" "I haven't the faintest notion. All this happened a good many years ago, when you were almost in your cradle. Why, Ralph, if he is alive, must be getting on in years by this time. There, that's about all the story that it's worth your while to know, my dear, and now we'll lock the correspondence away in my private safe. Let me have the portrait again when you have done with it." Yseulte, as we have said, was not a romantically inclined girl, yet, somehow, this faded portrait of the man of whom nobody had heard anything for almost as many years as she herself had lived, made a vivid impression on her. As she sat contemplating it, a voice arose from the lawn beneath, saying in the most approved Oxford drawl: "Ah, how do you do, Mrs Santorex? I've brought rather a queer plant that your husband may not have in his collection. It strikes me as a curious specimen." And then Mrs Santorex was heard asking the speaker in. Father and daughter looked at each other with the most comical expression in the world. Then the former murmured, with a dry, noiseless laugh: "He's found the four-leaved shamrock. Oh, Chickie, Chickie! have some pity on poor Geoffry Plantagenet, and put him out of his misery, once and for all!" The girl could hardly stifle her laughter. Her father, for his part, was thinking resignedly that to the bald expedients devised by enamoured youth as pretexts for numerous and wholly unnecessary visits to the parent or lawful guardian of its idol, there is no limit. CHAPTER TEN. POOR GEOFFRY. The clever author of "Mine is Thine" lays it down as an axiom that nothing so completely transforms the average sensible man into a consummate idiot for the time being as an _arriere pensee_; and it is an axiom the soundness of which all observation goes to prove.