"All right," she returned calmly. "Let it be a year hence. Meanwhile, we can be engaged. It'll please the dear old birds. I know all the tabbies in the town have been mewing about us. Now they can mew about somebody else." "That's awfully good of you, Peggy," said Marmaduke. "I'll go up to town to-morrow and get you the jolliest ring you ever saw." She sketched him a curtsy. "That's one thing, at any rate, I can trust you in--your taste in jewellery." He moved nearer to her. "I suppose you know, Peggy dear, I've been awfully fond of you for quite a long time." "The feeling is more or less reciprocated," she replied lightly. Then, "You can kiss me if you like. I assure you it's quite usual." He kissed her somewhat shyly on the lips. She whispered: "I do think I care for you, old thing." Marmaduke replied sententiously: "You have made me a very happy man." Then they sat down side by side on the sofa, and for all Peggy's mocking audacity, they could find nothing in particular to say to each other. "Let us play patience," she said at last. And when Mrs. Conover appeared awhile later, she found them poring over the cards in a state of unruffled calm. Peggy looked up, smiled, and nodded. "We've fixed it up, Mummy; but we're not going to be married for a year." Doggie went home that evening in a tepid glow. It contented him. He thought himself the luckiest of mortals. A young man with more passion or imagination might have deplored the lack of romance in the betrothal. He might have desired on the part of the maiden either more shyness, delicacy, and elusiveness, or more resonant emotion. The finer tendrils of his being might have shivered, ready to shrivel, as at a touch of frost, in the cool ironical atmosphere which the girl had created around her. But Doggie was not such a young man. Such passions as heredity had endowed him with had been drugged by training. No tales of immortal love had ever fired his blood. Once, somewhere abroad, the unprincipled McPhail found him reading _Manon Lescaut_--he had bought a cheap copy haphazard--and taking the delectable volume out of his hands, asked him what he thought of it. "It's like reading about a lunatic," replied the bewildered Doggie. "Do such people as Des Grieux exist?" "Ay, laddie," replied McPhail, greatly relieved. "Your acumen has pierced to the root of the matter. They do exist, but nowadays we put them into asylums. We must excuse the author for living in the psychological obscurity of the eighteenth century. It's just a silly, rotten book."