"Nevertheless you have failed this time," said Rob. And gentle Oswyth added as she set the front door back: "Leave the house at once, sir. You are not to discuss the subject, nor be so impertinent as to assume that my mother means less than every syllable that she has uttered." Here Lydia stepped to the fore. "This gentleman has left his hat in the kitchen. Come back the way you come in, sir, and I will hand it to you." Demetrius Dennis, who looked much chagrined--even wounded--by the girls' sternness, turned to Lydia with a grateful smile. "No offence meant, I don't see why there should be any taken," he said. "If you insist on keeping the stuff, and on me going, there isn't anything else to be done but to let you keep it, and to go. But you don't know how hard it is for me to believe you'd refuse the offer I'd have made. Say, I'll leave that card with you, and if you change your mind when you talk it over around the evening lamp to-night--as you may you know, as you may--why a postal card dropped to me at that address will fetch me out here right away. You hadn't ought to be angry, madam; it's all in the way of business." "I see that you consider it so. Another time you would be wiser to hesitate before you intrude. At least find out if you may inventory people's property. It doesn't matter. Lydia, take him safely out beyond Ben Bolt who evidently shares our prejudices against too great a disregard of private rights." And Mrs. Grey's lips twitched at the memory of the picture Mr. Demetrius Dennis had presented on their first glimpse of him. "I wish you good-morning, ladies," said that individual with a bow comprehensive of the irate younger ones, and the amused elder ladies. Then he followed Lydia to the kitchen in pursuit of his hat, and after an unaccountable delay they saw him crossing the orchard in Lydia's wake, who preceded him as a bulwark against Ben Bolt. At the rear gate their handmaid lingered long; the Greys saw her engaged in earnest conversation with the Graeco-Hibernian. By this time even Rob's indignation at his impertinence had given way to her sense of the ridiculous, and Mrs. Grey, Miss Charlotte, and the two girls were in the full tide of peals of laughter when Lydia reappeared to rebuke them tacitly by her gravity of demeanour, beneath which gleamed something like self-satisfaction. "He told me to go straight in to you when I got into the house and say that he wasn't one mite offended, and for you to preserve the card in case you changed your mind," said Lydia. "He's a gentleman, that's what he is," added Lydia, as she half turned in the doorway, as one who would be willing to entertain a motion to linger. "Is he, Lydia?" asked Rob demurely. "How did he prove it?"