"I only arrived this morning. It seems lovely. I must explore
to-morrow."

She was beginning to move off.

"Er--" John coughed to remove what seemed to him a deposit of sawdust
and unshelled nuts in his throat. "Er--may I--will you let me show
you--" prolonged struggle with the nuts and sawdust; then
rapidly--"some of the places to-morrow?"

He had hardly spoken the words when it was borne in upon him that he
was a vulgar, pushing bounder, presuming on a dead and buried
acquaintanceship to force his company on a girl who naturally did not
want it, and who would now proceed to snub him as he deserved. He
quailed. Though he had not had time to collect and examine and label
his feelings, he was sufficiently in touch with them to know that a
snub from her would be the most terrible thing that could possibly
happen to him.

She did not snub him. Indeed, if he had been in a state of mind
coherent enough to allow him to observe, he might have detected in her
eyes and her voice signs of pleasure.

"I should like it very much," she said.

John made his big effort. He attacked the nuts and sawdust which had
come back and settled down again in company with a large lump of some
unidentified material, as if he were bucking center. They broke before
him as, long ago, the Yale line had done, and his voice rang out as if