“It is in aid of that delightful orphanage at Wimblingham,” she explained, and gave me an animated account of the charity. He emptied his second cup of tea. “May I have a third cup?” he said. The two girls signalled departure, and her attention was distracted. “She collects—and I will confess she does it with extraordinary skill—the surreptitious addresses—” “John,” she said over her shoulder, “I wish you would tell Miss Smithers all those interesting things about Argon.” He gulped down his third cup, and rose with the easy obedience of the trained husband. Presently she returned to the tea-things. “Cannot I fill your cup?” she asked. “I really hope John was not telling you his queer notions about me. He says the most remarkable things. Quite lately he has got it into his head that he has a formula for my character.” “I wish _I_ had,” I said, with a sigh. “And he goes about explaining me to people, as though I was a mechanism. ‘Scalp collector,’ I think is the favourite phrase. Did he tell you? Don’t you think it perfectly horrid of him?” “But he doesn’t understand you,” I said, not grasping his meaning quite at the minute. She sighed. “You have,” I said, with infinite meaning, “my sincere sympathy—” I hesitated—“my whole sympathy.” “Thank you _so much_,” she said, quite as meaningly. I rose forthwith, and we clasped hands, like souls who strike a compact. Yet, thinking over what he said afterwards, I was troubled by a fancy that there was the faintest suggestion of a smile of triumph about her lips and mouth. Possibly it was only an honourable pride. I suppose he has poisoned my mind a little. Of course, I should not like to think of myself as one of a fortuitously selected multitude strung neatly together (if one may use the vulgarism) on a piece of string,—a stringful like a boy’s string of chestnuts,—nice old gentlemen, nice boys, sympathetic and humorous men of thirty, kind fellows, gifted dreamers, and dashing blades, all trailing after her. It is confoundedly bad form of him, anyhow, to guy her visitors. She certainly took it like a saint. Of course, I shall see her again soon, and we shall talk to one another about one another. Something or other cropped up and prevented my going there on her last Tuesday. THE APPLE “I must get rid of it,” said the man in the corner of the carriage, abruptly breaking the silence. Mr. Hinchcliff looked up, hearing imperfectly. He had been lost in the rapt contemplation of the college cap tied by a string to his portmanteau handles—the outward and visible sign of his newly-gained pedagogic position—in the rapt appreciation of the college cap and the pleasant anticipations it excited. For Mr. Hinchcliff had just matriculated at London University, and was going to be junior assistant at the Holmwood Grammar School—a very enviable position. He stared across the carriage at his fellow-traveller.