Dorothy gazed at him for a moment reflectively. “How lucky it was that Uncle Philip took us to the theatre on that evening! It was just a chance. And we might never have met you.” “It was lucky for me!” declared the other simply. “But would you have cared?” “Of course!” said the girl promptly, but lowering her blue eyes. “You see, I have never known a real live hero before. Do tell me about your fight in the hill-fort, or how you caught the Dacoits! Uncle Philip says that you ought to have had the V.C.” Sir Geoffrey replied by a little disparaging murmur. “Oh, it was quite a commonplace affair--all in the day’s work. Any one else would have done the same.” Dorothy settled herself back among her cushions resentfully, clasping her hands, rather sunburned, across her knees. “I should like to see them!” she declared contemptuously. “That’s just what that Jack Wilgress said--at least he implied it. It is true, he apologised afterwards. How I despise Oxford boys!” “I thought he was a very good fellow,” said Sir Geoffrey, diplomatically turning the subject from his own achievements. “I suppose it might improve him to have something to do; but he strikes me as a very good specimen of the ornamental young man.” “Ornamental!” echoed Dorothy sarcastically. “It would do him good to have to work for his living.” “Poor beggar, he couldn’t help being born with a silver spoon in his mouth--it isn’t his fault.” “Spoon!” exclaimed Miss Vandeleur. “A whole dinner service I should think. A soup-ladle at the very least. It’s quite big enough: perhaps that accounts for it!” The girl laughed, swaying back, with the grace of her years, against her cushions; then, observing that her companion’s grave grey eyes were fixed upon her, she grew suddenly demure, sighing with a little air of penitence. “I am very wicked to-day,” she confessed. “It’s the rain, I suppose, and want of exercise. Do you ever feel like that, Sir Geoffrey? Do you ever get into an omnibus and simply loathe and detest every single person in it? Do you long to swear--real swears, like our army in Flanders--at everybody you meet, just because it’s rainy or foggy, and because they are all so ugly and horrid? I do, frequently.” “I know, I know,” said the other sympathetically, while he reeled in his line and deftly untied the tiny hook. “Only, the omnibus has not figured very often in my case; it has generally been a hot court-house, or a dusty dâk-bungalow full of commercial travellers. But I don’t feel like that now, at all. I hope I am not responsible for your frame of mind?” “Oh,” protested Dorothy, “don’t make me feel such an abandoned wretch! I should have been much worse if you had not been here. I should have quarrelled with Uncle Phil, or been rude to my mother, or something dreadful. I’m perfectly horrid to her sometimes. And as it is, I have let her go up to town all alone--to see my dressmaker.”