It is curious that fashion has not yet decreed a mania for dyeing one’s complexion mahogany, that one might wear flame-colour with impunity. The buggy scattered the marketers. The Island horse, a plebeian creature of humble stature, seldom meets with the luxury of feeling superior. But the Island donkey is nothing but a door-mat on four legs, clogged red with the hectic mud of its mother land. A cheap-jack’s pony would feel a prince beside it. Mr. Wise, who had been met at the station by a very small brown boy with a very tall brown horse, had cantered away in another direction, with a message of greeting to Albert, the sincerity of which Miss Brown had possibly overrated. A bungalow crouched behind a copper-coloured hedge upon the sky-line. Two cotton trees surveyed it, one on each side. A drive of the violently ambitious kind shot at an impossible angle up to its door-step. “That is Park View, my home,” said Miss Brown. “Of course, as your dog’s name is Scottie,” murmured the suffragette. Miss Brown looked surprised. The poor suffragette’s attempts at polite interchange of fatuities never seemed to meet with the usual fate of such efforts. Her trivialities somehow always fell upon silence; if she ventured on the throwing of a light bridge over a gap in the conversation, it seemed to snap communication instead of furthering it. She was, of course, unlucky, but she was also, it must be admitted, too earnest in intention for petty intercourse. She tried too hard. The buggy, commending its springs to the mercy of Providence, charged the drive of Park View. On the door-step, carefully posed, Albert was reading a very large book. He started laboriously as the buggy approached, and placed the book under his arm, taking care that the title should be visible. An emaciated child, with manners too old, and clothes too young, for his years. “I have dot bissed you at all, Ah-Bargaret,” said Miss Brown’s genial nephew. “I have been too idterested id by dew book od Chebistry. I ab quite sorry you have cob back.” “Chemistry,” retailed Miss Brown to the lady novelist. “A child of ten. And—did you notice, he was so deep in his book, he got quite a start when we arrived.” Albert, at Park View, met with that appreciation of his poses which we all hope to meet in heaven. “Albert, you are to move into the back room,” said Miss Brown. “Why?” asked Albert. “To make room for this lady.” “Priceless child,” said the lady novelist in brackets. “Because she needs somewhere to rest,” said Miss Brown in a voice of tentative reproof. “But so do I.” “I had better move into the back room myself, then,” sighed his aunt. The suffragette began those hopeless protests which make the burden of an obligation so heavy. It is so very much easier as well as more blessed to give than to receive, that the wonder is that generosity should retain the name of a virtue. Up to a certain point we are all altruists, because it is too much trouble to be otherwise.