MURIEL had not in the least intended to find herself alone with Jack Hurstly in a canoe. It all happened so naturally that protests and excuses were out of the question. She looked rather wistfully at Gladys in a larger boat, who was talking with nervous gaiety to Alec Bruce, while Mary Huntly in the stern looked on with serene approval. Gladys would not look at her friend, and something in the girl’s manner and carriage seemed to denote an intense displeasure, which, after her confidence to Muriel, was not on the whole incomprehensible. Muriel sighed hopelessly. Circumstances, she thought, were against her, and Jack was with her; she might be stronger than the circumstances, but she had begun to feel that she was not as strong as Jack. “I really have changed my life a bit,” he went on, as if continuing their last conversation. “Do you know when you went to Stepney, and I got to know about all you were doing—how you gave those girls such a good time and helped them in their homes, and all that, you know—it made me feel what a cheap sort of thing the life of the fellows about town is, and how, after all, there isn’t so very much in just having a good time if there’s nothing else besides or beyond it. I hope you won’t think I’m talking awful rot?” he interrupted himself nervously. She shook her head; she found it difficult to speak; her hand dipped in the water seemed to her a sort of illustration of how impossible it was to grasp her treasure even while it surrounded her. They were singing down the stream the air of a new opera, and that, and the trailing branches overhead, would have made a wonder of beauty if she had not loved Gladys. “Sacrifices lasted too long,” she thought. “And so,” he continued, watching her with eager, earnest eyes as he talked, “while I was waiting for leave to go out to India I started a sort of club at home—among the tenants, you know. Nothing much of a place—only games and a room where the men can go and smoke and read their papers in the mornings. And it struck me that Miss Gladys’ cousin—am I boring you?” “No, Jack—Gladys’ cousin?” “That Parson Cyril Johnstone,” he explained, “was really an awfully good sort, and might help me a bit with the men—on his own line, you know. And as the vicar wanted a curate, it seemed to fit in rather decently. I had no idea how awfully interesting that kind of thing could be. Why, now I know the men, and drop in to play a game of billiards with them, you couldn’t believe how jolly they are with me; and many of them more decent, wholesome kind of men than one’s own sort. I should so much like to show you the place, Muriel, and ask your advice about it. I’m afraid I’m an awfully poor hand at managing that kind of thing.” “Mr. Cyril Johnstone knows more about men’s clubs than I do!” she replied with half-averted head. Jack smiled. He was not used to Muriel in this mood; it was more like other women whom he had been used to.