you'll work it for me. Will you?" So he started a settlement, and she
worked it for him, and he came about the place and got in the way and
wrote heavy cheques and adored Felicity and suggested at suitable
intervals that she should marry him.

Felicity had no intention of marrying him. She called him a rest. No one
likes being called a rest when they desire to be a stimulant, or even a
gentle excitement. Felicity was an immense excitement to Mr. Leslie
(though he concealed it laboriously under a heavy and matter-of-fact
exterior) and it is of course pleasanter when these things are
reciprocal. But Mr. Leslie perceived that she took much more interest
even in her young cousin Peter than in him. "Do you find him a useful
little boy?" she asked him this afternoon, before Peter and Urquhart
arrived.

Leslie nodded. "Useful boy--very. And pleasant company, you know. I don't
know much about these things, but he seems to have a splendid eye for a
good thing. Funny thing is, it works all round--in all departments.
Native genius, not training. He sees a horse between a pair of shafts in
a country lane; looks at it; says 'That's good. That would have a fair
chance for the Grand National'--Urquhart buys it for fifty pounds
straight away--and it _does_ win the Grand National. And he knows nothing
special about horses, either. That's what I call genius. It's the same
eye that makes him spot a dusty old bit of good china on a back shelf of
a shop among a crowd of forged rubbish. I've none of that sort of sense;
I'm hopeless. But I like good things, and I can pay for them, and I give
that boy a free rein. He's furnishing my house well for me. It seems to
amuse him rather."

"He loves it," said Felicity. "His love of pleasant things is what he