This, if you please, was the cynical Miss Copleigh. Here was I, almost an utter stranger to her, trying to tell her that Saumarez loved her and she was to come back to hear him say so! I believe I made myself understood, for she gathered the gray together and made him hobble somehow, and we set off for the tomb, while the storm went thundering down to Umballa and a few big drops of warm rain fell. I found out that she had been standing close to Saumarez when he proposed to her sister and had wanted to go home and cry in peace, as an English girl should. She dabbled her eyes with her pocket-handkerchief as we went along, and babbled to me out of sheer lightness of heart and hysteria. That was perfectly unnatural; and yet, it seemed all right at the time and in the place. All the world was only the two Copleigh girls, Saumarez and I, ringed in with the lightning and the dark; and the guidance of this misguided world seemed to lie in my hands. When we returned to the tomb in the deep, dead stillness that followed the storm, the dawn was just breaking and nobody had gone away. They were waiting for our return. Saumarez most of all. His face was white and drawn. As Miss Copleigh and I limped up, he came forward to meet us, and, when he helped her down from her saddle, he kissed her before all the picnic. It was like a scene in a theatre, and the likeness was heightened by all the dust-white, ghostly-looking men and women under the orange-trees, clapping their hands, as if they were watching a play--at Saumarez's choice. I never knew anything so un-English in my life. Lastly, Saumarez said we must all go home or the Station would come out to look for us, and WOULD I be good enough to ride home with Maud Copleigh? Nothing would give me greater pleasure, I said. So, we formed up, six couples in all, and went back two by two; Saumarez walking at the side of Edith Copleigh, who was riding his horse. The air was cleared; and little by little, as the sun rose, I felt we were all dropping back again into ordinary men and women and that the “Great Pop Picnic” was a thing altogether apart and out of the world--never to happen again. It had gone with the dust-storm and the tingle in the hot air. I felt tired and limp, and a good deal ashamed of myself as I went in for a bath and some sleep. There is a woman's version of this story, but it will never be written. ... unless Maud Copleigh cares to try. THE RESCUE OF PLUFFLES. Thus, for a season, they fought it fair-- She and his cousin May-- Tactful, talented, debonnaire, Decorous foes were they; But never can battle of man compare With merciless feminine fray. --Two and One. Mrs. Hauksbee was sometimes nice to her own sex. Here is a story to prove this; and you can believe just as much as ever you please.