an extract from the Morning Post reached him across the room.

"Don't you think that's rather nice?" he heard her ask, and then: "Oh,
here you aye! It's very nice to see you back!"

Shelton slipped into a wicker chair. Antonia looked up quickly from her
sketch-book, put out a hand, but did not speak.

He watched her bending head, and his eagerness was changed to gloom.
With desperate vivacity he sustained the five intolerable minutes of
inquiry, where had he been, what had he been doing? Then once again the
maiden aunt commenced her extracts from the Morning Post.

A touch on his sleeve startled him. Antonia was leaning forward; her
cheeks were crimson above the pallor of her neck.

"Would you like to see my sketches?"

To Shelton, bending above those sketches, that drawl of the well-bred
maiden aunt intoning the well-bred paper was the most pleasant sound
that he had ever listened to.

"My dear Dick," Mrs. Dennant said to him a fortnight later, "we would
rather, after you leave here, that you don't see each other again until
July. Of course I know you count it an engagement and all that, and
everybody's been writin' to congratulate you. But Algie thinks you ought
to give yourselves a chance. Young people don't always know what they're
about, you know; it's not long to wait."

"Three months!" gasped Shelton.