The tail stone then being handy, Mr Pratt was enjoying himself, when he suddenly became aware of steps behind, and hopped down in a most ungraceful fashion to stare with astonishment so blank, that by the time he had raised his hat Fin had gone by with her chin raised in the air, and a very disdainful look upon her countenance, and her sister, with a slightly heightened colour, had plunged into conversation with Mr Mervyn. Pratt stood half paralysed for a few moments, watching the party, until a turn in the lane hid them from sight, and then he refilled and lit his pipe, from which the burning weed had fallen. "It's a mistake," he said at last, between tremendous puffs at his pipe. "It's impossible. I don't believe it. One might call it a hallucination, only that the beardless female face is so similar in one woman to another that a man easily makes a mistake. Those cannot be the same girls that we saw at the steeplechase--it isn't possible; but there is a resemblance, certainly; and, treating the thing philosophically, I should say here we have the real explanation of what is looked upon as infidelity in the male being." A few puffs from the pipe, and then Mr Pratt reclimbed to his perch upon the stone. "I'll carry that out, and then write it down as a position worthy of argument. Yes, to be sure. Here it is. A man falls in love--say, for the sake of argument, at first sight, with a pretty girl, quite unknown to him before, upon a racecourse. Symptoms: a feeling of sympathetic attraction; a throbbing of the pulses; and the heart beating bob and go one. Say he gets to know the girl; is engaged to her; and is then separated by three or four hundred miles." A few more puffs, and sundry nods of the head, and then Mr Pratt went on. "He there encounters another girl, whose face and general appearance are so much like the face and general appearance of girl number one, that his secondary influences--to wit, heart, pulses, and sympathies generally--immediately give signals; love ensues, and he declares and is accepted by girl number two, while girl number one says he is unfaithful. The man is not unfaithful; it is simply an arrangement of Nature, and he can't help himself. Infidelity, then, is the same thing in a state of change. Moral: Nature has no business to make women so much alike." Mr Pratt got down once more from his perch, and began to stroll up the lane, to encounter Trevor at the end of a few minutes. "Did you meet any one?" was the inquiry. "Yes," said Pratt, "a gentleman and two ladies." "Well?" "Well?" "Did you not know them?" "Ah!" said Pratt, "then you, too, noticed the similarity of feature, did you?" "Similarity?" "Yes; wonderfully like the ladies we met at the steeplechase, were they not?"