' Have I improved? I'm delighted to hear it. I thought I was a hopeless case.'
' Not at all—no more hopeless than Charlie. You have developed a side your character which I hardly suspected you of having, and are beginning to take perfectly frivolous pursuits with great seriousness. You were much more annoyed at losing ten seconds to-day in that spill than you were at losing your cigarette-case.'
' I have been a pupil, that's all,' he said; ' I have been well taught since I have been here.'
'Tanti complimenti, ' said she. ' Really, when you came I was afraid you would be absorbed in telegrams and bargains and bulls and bears. But you have not; you have played very nicely. How much longer do you stop?'
They had come to the hotel, and were passing the big squares of light cast by the hall windows. He dropped the rope of his toboggan as she asked this, and stopped to pick it up, looking her full in the face.
' I shall go when I am told,' he said—' not a day before.'
She looked at him, and understood. It was the first personal word he had said to her since the little interview on her arrival, but it was so modest again, so self-obliterating, that it did not offend her with a sense that he had broken his word when he promised not to speak to her again on intimate subjects. It was sufficient to remind him of it very gently, just to cool him off, so to speak.
' We should all miss you, I am sure,' she said.
Charlie did not appear at dinner that evening. He had caught a little chill, it appeared, in the morning, and had gone to bed in a good deal of discomfort, with a somewhat high temperature. Mrs. Brancepeth, though she would not confess to any anxiety, yet felt anxious, and as soon as dinner was over went off to see how he was. She came back
