"He was unconscious for thirty hours. My store of small talk did not come up to that. Why do you ask me, father? Don't you wish me to talk to him?" "My dear child, I wish you to like him if you can. His father was my friend. We must show him hospitality just for his father's sake." "Oh, I'll take him in the park and flirt with him if you wish it. The nuns did not teach me how--I suppose flirtation was an extra." Again he looked at her closely. This flippancy veiled some humor he could not fathom. Was it possible that the girl had been fascinated already by a man well schooled in the arts of pleasing women. And what solution of his trouble would that be? If he gave Evelyn to the son of Georges Odin--a coward's temptation from which he shrank immediately, but not so far away that he put the thought entirely from him. "I mean nothing so foolish," he exclaimed sharply; "the Count is our guest and must be treated as such. I understand that he is allowed to go out to-day. If you have any wish to accompany him in the car, he will consider it a courtesy." "Thank you," she said in a hard voice, "I should really be frightened of the Vicar's wife." Her raillery closed the conversation. The Earl went upstairs to his guest. Evelyn, at a later hour, caught up a straw hat and ran off by herself to the little boat-house by the river. She was a skilful canoeist and there was just water enough for the dainty canoe her father had bought in Canada for her. Never was she so much alone as when lying, book in hand, beneath the shelter of some umbrageous willow; and to-day she welcomed solitude as she had never welcomed it since first they came to Melbourne Hall. One refuge there was above others--Di Vernon's Arbor, they called it, where the willows spread their trailing branches upon the very waters; where the banks were so many couches of verdant grass, the iris generous in its abundant beauty, the river but a pool of the deepest, most entrancing blue water--this refuge she had named the Lake of Dreams, and to this to-day she steered her frail craft, and there found that solitude she prized so greatly.