"Is that you, Miss Liddon? Getting a breath of sea air? That's right. Where are Mrs. Liddon and Miss Sarah?"

"Good evening, Mr. Churchill. Yes—a whiff; it is so pleasant when the sun is gone. My mother and sister were not able to come to-night, I—I am just going back to them."

"That you are not," said Mr. Churchill mentally; "not if I know it. But I must be careful what I'm about. She's shaking like a leaf—I can hear it in her voice. I mustn't be brutal and frighten her. Little lady that she is! She mustn't get the idea that I'm a Don Juan on the loose." He half turned as he dropped her hand, and said quietly, "I've been watching the mail boat. She's late. Do you see her over there?"

"Where?" asked Jenny; not that she wanted to see it, but that she didn't know what else to say at this upsetting moment.

"Just over there. But it's almost too dark to distinguish her. How glad they'll all be to get home in time for supper and a shore bed! Have you ever had a voyage?"

"Never."

"Then you don't know what a tedious thing it is."

"I only wish I did know," responded Jenny, who had gathered herself together. "I don't fancy I should suffer from tedium, somehow."

"Why? Do you want so much to travel? But of course you do, if you have never done it."

"Above all things," she said earnestly. "It is the dream of our life—my sister and I."

"You are happy in having it to come—in not being satiated, as I am. My dream just now is to settle down in a peaceful home, and never stir away from it any more."

The green light was on her face, and he saw her smile, as if no longer afraid of him.

"You can have whatever you dream," she said. "We shall probably never realise ours. Still, we can dream on. That costs nothing."

"Oh, you will realise it—never fear." He abandoned his peaceful home upon the spot, and determined to take her travelling directly they were married. And there was no prospect of tedium in that plan either, for his experience, full as it was, had never included the charm of such a companion, the delight of educating and enriching the mind of an intelligent woman who was also his own wife.

"Meanwhile," said Jenny, "we get books from the library, and read about the places that we want to see, and the routes to them. We know the Orient Line guide by heart. We hunt for pictures, and photographs, and illustrated books. There are some nooks and corners of Europe we know so well that we shall never want a guide when we get there—if we ever do get there."

"You'll get there," said Anthony confidently; "don't doubt it."

It never occurred to him that she might decline to be personally conducted by him, but that was natural in a man of whom women had always made so much. He added, struck by a bright thought, "If you are fond of looking at pictures of places, I will send you a portfolio of photos that I have—mementoes of my many wanderings—if I may. They would amuse Miss Sarah. I should like to give her some amusement, if I could, poor little girl." But he never thought of Sarah in his plan for becoming the showman of the world, except that she must be disposed of somehow—she and her mother and that young ass in the office—so that Jenny might be free, and at the same time easy in her mind about them.

Jenny received the offer of the photos in silence; then said, "Thank you" with a perplexed expression, indicating that a "but" was on its way. He hastened to intercept it.

"There's the steamer—do you see? Patience rewarded. They have a Lord on board and a returning Chief Justice, and the loyal citizens down to meet them have had no dinner. They've been waiting on the pier at Williamstown for hours. Come and sit down, won't you? I'm sure your little feet must be tired."

He used the adjective inadvertently, and Jenny shied at it for a moment, like a dazzled horse. But she had not the strength to resist her intense desire to be with him a little longer, especially with that word, that tone of voice, compelling her.

"I must be going home," she murmured, but was drawn as by a magnet after him when he turned to the bench on which she had before been sitting.

"It can't be more than eight o'clock, and now's the time you ought to be out, when it's cool and fresh," said he. "Don't you find the heat of that room very trying since the warm weather came?"

They talked about the tea-room in an ordinary way. Then they drifted into confidences about each other's private lives and interests; and from that they went on to discuss their respective views as to books, creeds, and the serious matters of life; and all the time Anthony Churchill kept a tight hand upon himself, that he might not frighten her. It had to be a very strenuous hand indeed, for it was a sentimental night, with the sea and the stars and the soft wind, and she had never looked so sweet as now, away from all the associations of the tea-room, which he had grown to hate, sitting pensively at rest, with her little hands in her lap. More than that, he had never known how well she was educated, how much thinking she had done, how intellectually interesting she was, until he had had this talk with her.

At last, in an unguarded moment, he said more than he had meant to say. Laying his hat beside him, that he might feel the cool fan of the wind over his slightly fevered brain, he drew a long breath, and exclaimed in a burst, "Well, you have given me a happy hour! I wonder when you'll give me another like it?"

Immediately she began to recollect how late it was, and to be in a flurry to get home to her mother. All at once the suspicion that he might be divining her feeling for him, and that she might be running wicked risks, assailed her. She rose from her seat without speaking.

"Not yet!" he pleaded impulsively, as she looked for him to rise too; "not yet! Five minutes more!" And he took her hand, which hung near him, and tried to draw her back to his side, looking up at her in all the beauty of his broad brows, and his bold nose, and his commanding manliness, with eyes that burned through hers to her shaking heart. This was love-making, she knew, though not a word of love was spoken, and, under all the circumstances surrounding him and her in their social life, it terrified her.

"I have stayed too long already," she said. "I ought not to have been here alone—so late."

The tremble in her voice, as well as the implication of her words, shocked him, and he pulled himself up sharply, regretting his indiscretions as much as she did hers.

"Oh, it's not late. But I'm imposing on good nature, trying to keep you merely to talk to me. Fact is, I seldom come across people that I care to talk to." He held his watch open under a lamp. "Later than I thought, though—late for you to be about alone, as you say, Miss Liddon. You don't mind my seeing you home, do you?"

She thanked him, and they walked to the tram together, without saying anything except that they thought rain was at hand; and the tram set her down almost at the door of her lodgings, where Mrs. Liddon and Sarah awaited her on the doorstep—Sarah in an ecstasy of secret joy at the apparent success of her manoeuvres.

Jenny never went alone to the pier after that night, and her admirer sought for another happy hour in vain. On the two occasions that he went to St. Kilda in the hope of a meeting, she had her family with her, and not all Sarah's artifices could disintegrate the party. Jenny loved him more distractedly than ever, but, having no assurance that he loved her in the right way, or loved her at all, she knew what her duty was. And she had the resolution to act accordingly, though it was a hard task. He had scruples about going to the tea-room by himself, after what Mary had said to him; and he found it no fun to go with her, or other ladies. Then the rush of the races set in. Mr. Oxenham and other guests arrived from the country; horses had to be inspected; betting business became brisk and absorbing; lunches, garden parties, dinners, balls, crowded upon one another in a way to carry a society man and bachelor off his feet. In short, for a few weeks Mr. Anthony Churchill almost forgot the tea-room. Almost—not quite. The portfolio of photographs arrived by the carrier (and the formal note of thanks for it was preserved, and is extant to this day); flowers for Sarah came from Paton's, at short intervals, with all the air of having been specially selected; Joey swaggered into the new sitting-room with news of his rise to £200 a year, imagining it to be the reward of transcendent merit. But poor little Jenny, harried with great crushes of tea-drinkers, worn with fatigue and heat and bad air and a restless mind, ready to go into hysterics at a touch, but for the fact that there was no time for such frivolities, sighed for the refreshment of her beloved's voice and face in vain. Day after day, week after week, she watched for his return, and he came not. She concluded that her effort to do her duty had been successful, and—though she would have done the same again, if necessary—she was heart-broken at the thought.

To tell the honest truth, as a faithful chronicler should do, our hero very nearly did abandon her at this juncture. When love, even the very best of love, is in its early stages, it is easily nipped by little accidents, like other young things. It wants time to toughen the tender sprout, and develop its growth and strength until it can defy vicissitudes; nothing but time will do it, let poets and novelists say what they like to the contrary. And so Anthony, not having been in love with Jenny Liddon for more than a few days (and having been many times in love), was seduced by the charms of the stable and the betting-ring and the good company in which he found himself, when deprived by circumstances of the higher pleasure of her society. More than that, her image was temporarily superseded by that of a beautiful and brilliant London woman who was on a visit to Government House, and whom in this time of festivity he was constantly meeting. She was a lady of title and high connections, and she singled him out for special favour because he was big and handsome, travel-polished and proper-mannered, and altogether good style as an attendant cavalier. His family (barring his stepmother), proudly aware of the mutual attraction, and pleased to hear it joked of and commented on amongst their friends, formed the confident expectation that a marriage would result, whereby their Tony would have a wife and a position of a dignity commensurate with his own surpassing worth.