Bobby played several sets of tennis with various partners of doubtful efficiency, opposed to the curate with a similar inadequate support who beseeched him plaintively to take her balls whenever they pitched a yard from her racket. And then the two young men insisted upon a rest, and sat on a bench a little apart from the feminine element and took stock of one another. Prudence and a dispirited-looking woman of uncertain age played a set against Mable North and the Sunday-school lady superintendent, who was stout and forty and of a practical turn of mind. She rather preferred playing in a feminine foursome. The curate had eyes only for Prudence. It is doubtful whether he knew who else was on the court. "Your cousin is so graceful," he remarked to Bobby in an undertone. And Bobby, interrupted in the business of observing the curate's infatuated glances, brought himself up sharply and allowed his surprised gaze to follow his companion's. "My--Oh! my aunt. Yes, she's ripping, isn't she?" "The relationship seems so absurd," the curate said, with his eyes on Bobby's long legs. "I always confuse it." "Yes," Bobby agreed. "I might as well be a grandfather as she my aunt. There's not a year's difference between us." He offered his cigarette case to the curate, who declined the invitation to smoke. "It is such a mistake to drug the brain," he said. "It's so difficult," Bobby returned cheerfully, "to know whether one has a brain to drug." "Oh! I don't think anyone can have any doubt about that," the curate returned seriously. "No," Bobby agreed. "It is generally the other people who entertain doubts." He lighted himself a cigarette and slipped the case into his pocket. "Prudence smokes--like a furnace," he added--"whenever she gets the chance." Smokes! and surreptitiously! The curate was horrified. "You are joking surely?" he said. "Not much of a joke, when I have to supply the fags." Bobby looked amused. "We have to be mighty close about it. _I_ am not allowed to smoke in the Presence." So he designated Miss Agatha. "But we moon about the garden at night and enjoy ourselves." "Well played!" cried the curate enthusiastically, and ignored Bobby's confidence in his warm admiration for Prudence's spirited return. "That was very neatly placed indeed," he said. "Prudence is a very deceptive player. She always scores through trickery," Bobby observed, and watched the effect of this remark on his disapproving listener. "Nothing very brilliant about her play, you may note; but she wins all the time." "She is so very graceful," the curate said again, as though this quality was accounted a virtue in his estimation, as probably it was. "He's an awful ass, Prue," Bobby confided to her later. "And I've spoilt your matrimonial chances by telling him you smoke." Whereupon Prudence laughed sceptically. "As though I couldn't counteract that by allowing him to convert me from the evil practice," she said.