Miss Simpson was so anxious to establish the fact of the marked similarity in their tastes that she blundered into the declaration that she doted on dogs, particularly bull-dogs. Mr Musgrave received this statement coldly. "I am afraid I cannot sympathise with your enthusiasm," he replied. "I dislike dogs--particularly bull-dogs." "Then why," asked Miss Simpson very naturally, "do you keep a bull-dog?" "I am only taking care of it for a friend," he explained. "How very kind of you," she gushed. "Such a responsibility, other people's pets." She embarked upon a windy dissertation about a cat she had once taken charge of for some one, and the trouble and expense this ungrateful animal had caused her. "But you can't chain up a cat," she explained. "People are so selfish. They never consider how they trespass on one's kindness." "If service called for no sacrifice it would not be kindness," Mr Musgrave replied sententiously. "Ah, how true that is!" exclaimed Miss Simpson. "You have such a comprehensive way of putting things. One _ought_ to be kind, of course." "I think," he replied with emphasis, "if the desire to be kind is lacking, it is just as well to leave it alone." "Yes," she acquiesced flatly. "That's true, too. But we most of us desire to be kind, don't we?" "No," he returned in his bluntest manner; he was feeling too annoyed to wish to be civil. "I fancy in the majority of us that desire is a negligible quantity." "But not in you," she said insinuatingly. "In me most pronouncedly," he asserted with conviction. If this quality were not lacking in himself in a general sense he knew at that moment it was most assuredly lacking in relation to her. Mr Musgrave, having been guilty of ungraciousness, was immediately ashamed of his irritation, and during the remainder of the walk he sought to atone for his former discourtesy by a greater amiability than Miss Simpson was accustomed to from him--a mistaken form of kindness which led to the encouragement of all manner of false hopes in Miss Simpson's maiden mind. CHAPTER TWENTY SIX. John Musgrave sat at his solitary breakfast-table and regarded the covered dishes before him with, for the first time within his memory, so little interest in their contents that he felt a strange disinclination to uncover them. This lack of appetite, he decided, resulted either from indisposition or from approaching age. Since he felt no indisposition, he attributed it to the latter cause. Persons of advancing middle-age were less hearty than youth at the beginning of the day. That was only natural. Therefore he did not lift the covers, but made an indifferent breakfast of toast and coffee.