bushes, and muttered under his breath: “By Jove, I’ll do it!” Next morning, with a touch of unusual restraint, Blagdon dissembled his wrath with Lola Corbett, and accepted her playful enquiry as to “why he had never come near her in the Casino?” with commendable indifference. “The Duke was longing to meet you,” she lied. “We searched for you everywhere. Now he has gone off to Paris. He left by the morning train.” To which Hugo (also lying) replied with complete _sang-froid_: “All right, better luck next time--express my profound regrets when you write!” Mrs. Corbett surveyed him under her thick black lashes. So Hugo could joke; he had not noticed--what a relief! “Oh, Hugo,” she resumed, with well-simulated animation, “what _do_ you think, some dreadful person has bought my adorable pet necklace--wasn’t it wicked of them? When I went to pay it my daily visit, it was gone. Who can have bought it?” and she looked at him sharply, but Hugo merely struck a match, and shook his head. “He probably has it in his pocket the whole time,” the lady assured herself, for she had entered the shop full of anxious enquiries, and received a most particular description of the purchaser, and his name--since Blagdon was a well-known figure, and a generous customer to many of the establishments in the principality. No later than the next morning it was Mrs. Corbett’s turn to be the victim of a disagreeable surprise. She discovered Hugo in the principal florist’s, in the act of despatching his offering to The Holt. “Miss Glyn,” she read aloud over his shoulder. “Oh, you sly, sly Hugo! If you send these floral tributes to that pretty little schoolgirl, her aunt will snap you up before you know where you are; and she will be a thousand times worse than any mother-in-law--a hateful, managing, dangerous woman.” “I know how to take care of myself,” he answered sullenly; “and flowers are only flowers--just a little civility and nothing more.” Mrs. Corbett’s shot about the aunt had gone home; and Blagdon actually began to waver with respect to the resolution he had made in the garden. He had a horror of being what is called ‘managed’--he who was so successfully exploited by his sister and his friends--and if only Lola could have let well alone, his idea of Letty Glyn might possibly have faded; but as it was, she was continually chaffing about ‘his little village maid,’ ‘his pretty schoolgirl, and her pinafores,’ and Hugo Blagdon, was a man who could not stand being laughed at,--although he keenly enjoyed seeing others turned into ridicule; so one evening at supper, surrounded by a gay and mixed company, when Mrs. Corbett threw her gibe across at him, stung to revolt and indiscretion, his temper suddenly boiled over, and he exclaimed: