phantom, which would have done credit to a much finer imagination than he really possessed, had not he viewed the situation through the eyes of a lover, to whose vision all is intensified. He saw, what was true, that Sybil listened with very genuine interest to what Bilton had to say; he saw her an eager pupil of that excellent skater; he saw, if some expedition was projected, that she left all the arrangements of sleighs and food in his hands. To the unbiassed observer nothing could have been more natural, for he talked well on subjects that interested her, he gave her valuable aid towards accomplishing the elusive outside back edge, and his arrangements in expeditions were admirable; for sleighs were punctual, and nothing was forgotten out of the luncheon-basket. But Charlie was not unbiassed, and the conclusions that slowly and silently formed themselves in his mind were both untrue in the abstract and in the concrete unjust to her. He was still sufficiently young to have an attack of childishness, and he was quite sufficiently in love with her to be a prey to jealousy.
The second week of Bilton's stay had passed, and still he dropped no hint about his imminent return, and on this particular morning, after a rather worried week, rendered not more easy because he kept his worries strictly to himself, Charlie had just returned rather gloomily from a visit to his doctor.
During the last ten days he had gone down a little in weight, and, though the doctor would have preferred it otherwise, he reminded him that he must have ups and downs; no cure was uninterrupted progress. But this, piled on the top of his other cares, which were rendered harder to bear by a couple of days of south wind, instead of the cold purity of windlessness, unduly depressed him, and Sybil, coming out of the hotel to the sheltered corner of the veranda which he usually occupied in the morning, found him somewhat listless and dejected. But, with tact which
