"Humph! what a chance. The old boys are snoring in the dining-room, each with a handkerchief over his head, and for the next two hours I dare say we should be alone, and--drink tea!" he said with an air of disgust. "I hope she won't be so confoundedly fond of tea when we're married. It's rather too much of a good thing sometimes. And a man wants change." He thrust his hands deeply into his coat pockets, where one of them came in contact with a cigar, which he took out, bit off the end mechanically, and stood rolling it to and fro between his lips. "Shall I go in?" he asked himself. "Hang it, no! If one's too much with a girl she'll grow tired of you before marriage. Better keep her off a little, and not spoil her too soon. Yes, she really is a very handsome girl. Just fancy her in one of the smartest dresses a tip-top place could turn out, and sitting beside a fellow on a four-in-hand-- Ascot, say, or to some big meet. There won't be many who will put us-- her, I mean"--he added, with a dash of modesty--"in the shade. Here, I'll go and have a talk to her. No, I won't. I sha'n't get my cigar if I do. We shall have plenty of _tete-a-tetes_, I dare say. And I promised to-night--What's she reading, I wonder? Last new novel, I suppose. Puzzles me," he said to himself, as he swung round, "how a woman can go on reading novels at the rate some of them do. Such stuff! It's only about one in a hundred that is written by anybody who knows what life really is--about horses and dogs--and sport," he added after a little thought. "Poor little Glynne. It pleases her, though, and I sha'n't interfere, but she might cultivate subjects more that agree with my tastes--say the hunt--and the field." He gave one glance over his shoulder at the picture of the reading girl in the drawing-room and then went off across the lawn, to be stopped by the wire fence, against which he paused as if measuring its height. Then going back for a dozen yards or so he took a sharp run, meaning to leap it, but stopped short close to the wire. "Won't do," he muttered; "too dark." He then stepped over it, bending the top wire down and making it give a loud twang when released, as he walked on sharply towards the footway that crossed the path and led away to the fir woods, whistling the while. Perhaps if he had known that the book Glynne was reading with such eagerness did not happen to be a novel, but a study of the heavens, by one, Mr Lockyer, the ideas that coursed through his mind would not have been of quite so complacent a character--that is to say, if the strain upon his nature to supply him with muscles and endurance had left him wit enough to put that and that together, and judge by the result. "It's getting precious dull here, and home's horrid," said Rolph, as he stopped in the shadow of a tree, whose huge trunk offered shelter from the breeze.