"Immensely, of course. Then we had better go round to Redfern's to-day and order tailor-made things; something that looks rough, you know, but isn't. I hate rough things, they make me feel creepy. Ah! there is Jack coming round the gardens. Good-bye, dearest." She stooped to kiss her mother dutifully ere leaving, and Mrs. Woodward seized the opportunity. "Good-bye, darling, and before you go, Alice, about Jack." "What about Jack, mamma?" "You might tell him--perhaps." "What shall I tell him?" asked the girl, a trifle petulantly. "That we are going down to stay at Gleneira with the Macleods. That is really all there is to tell--as yet." "I know that, my dear; still--still it would be better if Jack did not follow you about so much." "Of course, it would be better, and I have told him so often; I will tell him again, if you like, so don't be anxious, you good, pretty little mamma. I am very fond of Jack--he is a dear fellow--but I don't intend to marry him. I see quite well how foolish it would be for us both." Mrs. Woodward, as she watched the riders pass down the road, told herself that Alice was one in a thousand, and deserved to be happy, as no doubt she would be if she married Paul Macleod, who was so very nice-looking. This point of good looks was one upon which Mrs. Woodward laid great insistence, and it enabled her to spend the next hour or two in finishing a sentimental novel in which the lovers, after sternly rejecting the counsels of parents and guardians, were rewarded in the third volume with £50,000 a year and a baronetcy. For, like most mothers, poor Mrs. Woodward was sadly at sea on the matrimonial question. Its romantic side appealed to her fancy, its business side to her experience, since no woman can have done her duty in the married state for a quarter of a century without seeing that where personal pleasure has been the motive power in one point, sheer personal self-abnegation has been the motive in ten. Meanwhile the cousins, after cantering round the Row, had reined in their horses for a walk. Alice rode well, and the exercise had brought an unwonted animation to her appearance. Jack, on the other hand, was a tall, burly young fellow, a trifle over-dressed, but otherwise unobjectionable, looked his best, with a heartwhole admiration for his companion on his honest face. What a pretty couple they would make, thought an old spinster, taking her constitutional in Kensington Gardens, and began straightway to dream of a certain hunt ball where someone had danced with her five times before supper. How many times afterwards she had never had to confess, even to her twin sister; thanks to the extras, which, of course, need not count. And yet nothing had come of it! And just as she got so far in her reminiscences Alice was saying to Jack pleasantly, "I shall miss these rides of ours, Jack, shan't you?"