‘Oh, much oftener; don’t you recollect, Anne, you played football too, and you were capital, the boys said?’ Now Anne was, in fact, much troubled by this revelation. She, in her present superlative condition, walking about in a halo of higher things, to be presented to a stranger who was not a stranger, and, no doubt, would soon hear all about her, as a football player, a girl who was athletic, a tom-boy, neither less nor more! She was about to reply with annoyance, when the ludicrous aspect of it suddenly struck her, and she burst into a laugh in spite of herself. ‘There is such a thing as an inconvenient memory,’ she said. ‘I am not proud of playing football now.’ ‘I am not at all ashamed of it,’ said Rose. ‘I never should have known what a goal was if I hadn’t played. Do you play tennis, _too_, Mr. Heathcote? It is not too cold if you are fond of it. Charley said you were good at anything--good all round, he said.’ ‘That is a very flattering reputation, and you must let me thank Mr. Charley, whoever he is, for sounding my trumpet. But all that was a hundred years ago,’ Heathcote said; and this made up a little lost ground for him with Anne, for she thought she heard something like a sigh. ‘You will like to try the covers,’ said Mr. Mountford. ‘I go out very little myself now-a-days, and I daresay you begin to feel the damp, too. I don’t preserve so much as I should like to do; these girls are always interfering with their false notions; but, all the same, I can promise you a few days’ sport.’ ‘Is it the partridges or the poachers that the young ladies patronise?’ Heathcote said. ‘My dear,’ said Mrs. Mountford, ‘what is the use of calling attention to Anne’s crotchets? She has her own way of thinking, Mr. Heathcote. I tell her she must never marry a sportsman. But, indeed, she has a great deal to say for herself. It does not seem half so silly when you hear what she has got to say.’ Anne presented a somewhat indignant countenance to the laughing glance of the new cousin. She would not be drawn into saying anything in her own defence. ‘You will find a little sport, all the same,’ said Mr. Mountford; ‘but I go out very seldom myself; and I should think you must be beginning to feel the damp, too.’ ‘Not much,’ said the younger man, with a laugh. He was not only athletic and muscular, but conscious of his strength, and somewhat proud of it. The vigour in him seemed an affront to all Anne’s pre-conceived ideas, as it was to her father’s comfortable conviction of the heir’s elderliness; his very looks seemed to cast defiance at these two discomfited critics. That poor lady in the Italian palace! it could not have been she that was so much in the wrong, after all.