We certainly must not let Deryck know that Jim Airth--what a nice name--was at Targai. He would move you on, promptly. Report again next week; and do abide, if necessary, beneath the safe chaperonage of the cameo brooch. Yours, in all fidelity, JANE DALMAIN. CHAPTER VIII IN HORSESHOE COVE Lady Ingleby sat in the honeysuckle arbour, pouring her tea from a little brown earthenware teapot, and spreading substantial slices of home-made bread with the creamiest of farm butter, when the aged postman hobbled up to the garden gate of the Moorhead Inn, with a letter for Mrs. O'Mara. For a moment she could scarcely bring herself to open an envelope bearing another name than her own. Then, smiling at her momentary hesitation, she tore it open with the keen delight of one, who, accustomed to a dozen letters a day, has passed a week without receiving any. She read Mrs. Dalmain's letter through rapidly; and once she laughed aloud; and once a sudden colour flamed into her cheeks. Then she laid it down, and helped herself to honey--real heather-honey, golden in the comb. She took up her letter again, and read it carefully, weighing each word. Then:--"Good old Jane!" she said; "that is rather neatly put: the 'safely abstract' becoming the 'perilously personal.' She has acquired the knack of terse and forceful phraseology from her long friendship with the doctor. I can do it myself, when I try; only, _my_ Sir Derycky sentences are apt merely to sound well, and mean nothing at all. And--after all--_does_ this of Jane's mean anything worthy of consideration? Could six foot five of abstraction--eating its breakfast in complete unconsciousness of one's presence, returning one's timid 'good-morning' with perfunctory politeness, and relegating one, while still debating the possibility of venturing a remark on the weather, to obvious oblivion--ever become perilously personal?" Lady Ingleby laughed again, returned the letter to its envelope, and proceeded to cut herself a slice of home-made currant cake. As she finished it, with a final cup of tea, she thought with amusement of the difference between this substantial meal in the honeysuckle arbour of the old inn garden, and the fashionable teas then going on in crowded drawing-rooms in town, where people hurried in, took a tiny roll of thin bread-and-butter, and a sip at luke-warm tea, which had stood sufficiently long to leave an abiding taste of tannin; heard or imparted a few more or less detrimental facts concerning mutual friends; then hurried on elsewhere, to a cucumber sandwich, colder tea, which had stood even longer, and a fresh instalment of gossip. "Oh, why do we do it?" mused Lady Ingleby. Then, taking up her scarlet parasol, she crossed the little lawn, and stood at the garden gate, in the afternoon sunlight, debating in which direction she should go.