Girls of twenty-three are usually fervent letter-writers and Gabrielle was no exception. She had furnished folios of gossip that very day for her friend, Eva Achon, who had been her intimate upon the ship. But when it came to writing "John Sebastian Faber, Esq.," her pen trembled upon the paper. How impossible it seemed to say anything to which such a man would listen. She depicted him as she had last seen him upon the deck of the _Oceanic_, stretched on a sofa-chair, and smiling at her philosophy. "Letters answered themselves," he had said. He got through life on cables and confidence. There was not a private letter in fifty which said anything worth saying. He had proposed a league for the suppression of private correspondence, and begged her to be one of the vice-presidents. She remembered her own disappointment that he had not asked her to write to him. So it was no easy thing at all to begin, chiefly because she feared his irony and was quite sure that her letter would achieve nothing. Half-a-dozen sheets of good "cream laid" note were destroyed before she could get her craft launched and she was still in harbour so to speak when she heard her name cried out in the street below, and opening the window immediately, discerned Harry Lassett with skates upon his arm. "Is that you, Gabrielle?" The cold was intense and filled the room with icy vapour. She shivered where she stood, and drew her dressing-gown close about her white throat. "Whatever are you doing, Harry? It's nearly eleven o'clock." "I know that. We've been skating on the Vale. There'll be grand ice to-morrow. Won't you come? You must!" "I haven't got any skates!" "Oh, send into town for some. I'll go myself if you'll throw me out an old boot. You don't mean to say you're going to miss it?" She shook her head and tried to shield herself behind the heavy curtains. "I fear I'll have to go visiting to-morrow." "What, those American dollars again! No! They're spoiling you; I thought you had done with that nonsense." "I did not say they were American. I am going to Richmond to see Eva Achon." "Oh, hang Eva Achon. We shall have bandy, if it holds. Throw me out that boot, and I'll go away. Your people go to bed in the middle of the day, don't they? It's all locked up like a prison down here." "I am not in bed, Harry. I am writing a letter." "American, of course?" "Of course," and she laughed at him. Then the boot was found, and tossed out. "How's that?" he asked--a man who had played for Middlesex and the 'Varsities could not have asked any other question. "Let me know just how much they are, and I will send it round in the afternoon. Father promised me a pair to-night. I'm glad you can get them for me." "Right oh! We shall skate on the Vale directly I return. Dr. Houghton of Grindelwald wants me to have a pair of his blades. You'd better have the same. They're grand!"