"For more advice?" she queried, and, receiving no answer, continued demurely: "Of course I haven't the remotest idea whom you mean to honour, but it does seem to me that the wives of Englishmen allow themselves to be treated shamefully, and I once made out a list of objections which I always said I would present to any Englishman who proposed to me. Of course," she hastened to add, "you will probably marry an English girl, who won't mind." "I haven't said so!" he interjected. "No," she said meditatively, "you haven't. I'll tell you what they are if you wish." "Do," he begged. "Well, in the first place," she continued, "I should refuse to be a 'chattel.'" "Oh I say----" he began. But she went on, unheeding his expostulation: "Then my husband couldn't beat me, not even once, though the law allows it." "What do you take us for?" he exclaimed. "Then," she proceeded, "he would have to love me better than his horses and his dogs." "Oh I say! Mabel," he burst out, teased beyond all limits of endurance, "don't chaff me; I'm awfully in earnest, you know, and if you will accept what little I have to offer--three thousand a year, and 'The Towers,' now poor Bob's gone----" He paused, but she made no answer, only he noticed that all of a sudden she had become very serious. "Lady Mary, my mother, you know, would of course leave the place to you at once, but there's no title; my father was only a knight. I'm sorry----" "Oh," she replied, "I wouldn't have married you if you had had one; quite enough of my countrywomen have made fools of themselves on that account." "Then you will marry me!" he cried, and sprang towards her. She saw her slip and tried to correct it. "I haven't said----" she began, but the sentence was never finished; for Harold Stanley Malcolm St. Hubart Scarsdale, of "The Towers," Sussex, closed the argument and the lips of Miss Mabel Vernon, of Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A., at one and the same time. * * * * * Robert Allingford, United States Consul at Christchurch, England, and Marion, youngest daughter of Sir Peter and Lady Steele, were seated on the balcony of the Hyde Park Club one hot afternoon. Everybody had gone down to the races at Goodwood, and the season was drawing its last gasp. The "Row," which they overlooked, was almost deserted, save for an occasional depressed brougham, while the stretches of the Park beyond were given over to nursemaids and their attendant "Tommies" and "Bobbies." Mamma was there, of course. One must be conventional in London, even in July; but she was talking to the other man, Jack Carrington, who had been invited especially for that purpose, and was doing his duty nobly.