I am bound to admit that I admired Lady Cecilia with an envy that might be qualified as green. She was not clever and she was not well educated, but her high breeding was so spontaneous. She so obviously belonged to spheres where no other rule obtained. Her manner was the union of polish and simplicity; each word she pronounced was a pleasure to the ear. In my own case life had been a struggle with that American-Canadian crudity which stamps our New World carriage and speech with commonness; but you could no more imagine this girl lapsing from the even tenor of the exquisite than you could fancy the hermit thrush failing in its song. When Mrs. Billing was quite at the other end of the room my companion's manner underwent a change. During a second or two of silence her eyes fell, while the shifting of color over the milk-whiteness of her skin was like the play of Canadian northern lights. I was prepared for the fact that beneath her poise she might be shy, and that, being shy, she would be abrupt. "You're engaged to Hugh Brokenshire, aren't you?" The words were whipped out fast and jerkily, partly to profit by the minute during which Mrs. Billing was at a distance, and partly because it was a matter of now-or-never with their utterance. I made the necessary explanations, for what seemed to me must be the hundredth time. I was not precisely engaged to him, but I had said I would marry him if either of two conditions could be carried out. I went on to state what those conditions were, finishing with the information that of the two I had practically abandoned one. She nodded her comprehension. "You see that--that they won't come round." "No," I replied, with some incisiveness; "they will come round--especially Mr. Brokenshire. It's the other condition I no longer expect to see fulfilled." If the hermit thrush could fail in its song it did it then. Lady Cecilia stared at me with a blankness that became awe. "That's the most extraordinary thing I ever heard. Ethel Rossiter must be wrong." I had a sudden suspicion. "Wrong about what?" The question put Lady Cecilia on her guard. "Oh, nothing I need explain." But her face lighted with quick enthusiasm. "I call it magnificent." "Call what 'magnificent'?" "Why, that you should have that conviction. When one sees any one so sporting--" I began to get her idea. "Oh, I'm not sporting. I'm a perfect coward. But a sheep will make a stand when it's put to it." With her hands in her sable muff, her shapely figure was inclined slightly toward me. "I'm not sure that a sheep that makes a stand isn't braver than a lion. The man my sister Janet is engaged to--he's in the Inverness Rangers--often says that no one could be funkier than he on going into action; but that," she continued, her face aglow, "didn't prevent his being ever so many times mentioned in despatches and getting his D. S. O." "Please don't put me into that class--"