kettle bubbled, and Tishy's grey and gleaming glances through the smoke were like a succession of boxes of matches, cast upon the responsive fires of Larry's and Georgy's holiday hearts. The young May moon has often been a factor in affairs of the heart whose importance cannot be ignored. It is true that on this especial afternoon the mischief might seem to have been begun before she could, strictly, have been held responsible; none the less her madness must have been in the air, otherwise it is difficult to account for the joint and simultaneous overthrow of two young gentlemen of taste and quality, by Miss Tishy Mangan. Georgy, aged but 19, just home from far and forlorn seas, with, as the poet says, a heart for any fate, might have been excused for swallowing any good provided for him by the gods, whole, and without criticism, but for Mr. St. Lawrence Coppinger, lately come of age, a man of taste, endowed with special _finesse_ of feeling, it might have been expected that a highly-coloured peacock butterfly would have had but scant appeal. In fact, one is driven back upon the young May Moon as the sole plausible explanation of the fact that, on that afternoon of bewitchment, Tishy Mangan went to Larry's head. These temporary aberrations are afflictions for which the most refined young men must occasionally be prepared, and Larry's overthrow was not without justification. Quite apart from her looks--and anyone would have been forced to admit that they were undeniable--there was her voice, the true contralto _timbre_, thick and mellow, dark and sweet, like heather honey, he thought, while he and Georgy sprawled on the grass at her feet (and she had good feet) making very indifferent jokes, in that exaggerated travesty of an Irish brogue which is often all that an English school will leave with Irish boys, and vicing with each other in the folly proper to such an occasion. "I don't see your shoe-buckles!" Larry said, looking from her feet to her lips, with a meaning and impudent lift of his blue eyes. "Have you given up wearing them?" Tishy's colour deepened; she remembered instantly what she was meant to remember. "You're regretting the choice you made, are you?" she said, with a toss of her head. "Never fear! The buckles will be there when they're wanted!" "Don't trouble about them!" says Larry, tremendously pleased with his success as a flirtatious man of the world; "I don't think they will be required!"