She was holding the hem of her dress and examining ruefully the havoc wrought on a flounce by a projecting nail. "You were about to say——?" She looked up at him with an angry frown. "Even in Brockley it is considered an outrageous piece of bad manners to thrust oneself upon people who do not wish to know one!" "Keep to the subject, please," he said severely; "we were discussing the cat." She favoured him with the faintest shrug. "I’m afraid I cannot discuss any matter with you," she said coldly, "you have taken a most unwarrantable liberty." She turned to walk into the house. "You forget," he said gently, "I am a duke. I have certain feudal privileges, conferred by a grateful dynasty, one of which, I believe, is to shoot cats." "I can only regret," she fired back at him, from the door of the little conservatory that led into the house, "that I cannot accept your generous estimate of yourself. The ridiculous court that is being paid to you by the wretched people in this road must have turned your head. I should prefer the evidence of De Gotha before I even accepted your miserable title." Slam! She had banged the door behind her. "Here I say!" called the alarmed Duke, "please come back! Aren’t I in De Gotha?" He looked down on Hank. "Hank," he said soberly, "did you hear that tremendous charge? She don’t believe there is no Mrs. Harris!" V Two days later he ascended the step ladder again. With leather gloves, a gardening apron, and with the aid of a stick she was coaxing some drooping Chinese daisies into the upright life. "Good morning," he said pleasantly, "what extraordinary weather we are having." She made the most distant acknowledgment and continued in her attentions to the flowers. "And how is the cat?" he asked with all the bland benevolence of an Episcopalian bench. She made no reply. "Poor Tibby," he said with gentle melancholy— "Poor quiet soul, poor modest lass, Thine is a tale that shall not pass." The girl made no response. "On the subject of De Gotha," he went on with an apologetic hesitation, "I——" The girl straightened her back and turned a flushed face towards him. A strand of hair had loosened and hung limply over her forehead, and this she brushed back quickly. "As you insist upon humiliating me," she said, "let me add to my self abasement by apologizing for the injustice I did you. My copy of the Almanac De Gotha is an old one and the page on which your name occurs has been torn out evidently by one of my maids——" "For curling paper, I’ll be bound," he wagged his head wisely. "Immortal Caesar, dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away; The Duke’s ancestral records well may share The curly splendours of the housemaid’s hair." As he improvised she turned impatiently to the flower bed. "Miss Terrill!" he called, and when she looked up with a resigned air, he said— "Cannot we be friends?"