She could forgive Miss Skene her tantrums, and even, apparently, her desertion, but not so readily could she forgive the imposition of Sir Andrew, who had made her look ridiculous to herself. Even yet her face would burn when she thought of her indiscretion. It was no excuse for her, she knew, that she should have chattered to him only in her ignorance of his identity, but the offence began with him. "It was too bad!" she declared, "and you can tell him so from me. I abominate the kind of joke that starts with falsehood."

"But it wasn't exactly falsehood with my cousin," protested Norah. "He was Tom Dunn for the occasion, and if you knew him as well as I do, you would understand that he kept up the character for the sake of Mrs Nish, whose post-hiring business would suffer badly if it were generally known that she let jocular amateurs drive her landau. Why are you so unforgiving?"

"I suppose it's just my vanity," confessed Penelope. "When I think of it I feel so-so small. I was taken at a disadvantage; it was cowardly. And I hope I'll never meet him, for I'll tell him so."

For three or four weeks she was certainly not to meet him, but still he got to know her day by day more intimately; day by day with more surprise Norah would and curiosity. come from the patient's bedroom betraying her amusement at some new phase of that rebel nature; Captain Cutlass had a full report of everything. "Why!" he would

ory,

I'm sorry

"she's splendid! she won't forgive me, but she's right. When will she be able to be out? I'm all impatience.

"Tohk! tchk! Andrew," said Amelia in despair. "A saucy- "but she suddenly checked herself, at the disapproval of his countenance.

What are her imperfections?" he demanded from his

cousin. "You've been telling me of nothing but her merits. "I didn't say she had any imperfections," answered Norah, smiling.

"Good Lord!" said Captain Cutlass hurriedly, "I hope she's not inhuman. But no: I remember! At least she has a fiery temper; I heard it in her very first words to me on Duntryne quay, and I saw it in her eyes when I made to help her to her feet on the riverside. But after all, temper's hardly an imperfection. There's a frightful kind of tame submission in some of your sex compared with which the violence of a virago is a virtue. There must be something else-ah! I remember: a strained, high, unrefined inflection in her voice, not quite pleasant, when she was contradictory. Women should have quiet, sweet, level voices, even when they're furious."

"I see nothing wrong with her voice," protested Norah. "It seems to me rather pretty and musical."

learn to sing before they have learned to speak is a thing I could never understand. They're speaking all the time, and they're only sometimes singing. They might as well learn to dance before they have learned to walk."

apt to be followed by the same regrets that it brings to common mortals. Her annoyance with you is wounded pride; she feels that you had her at a disadvantage when she was indiscreet."

"Yes," said Sir Andrew, "that was another thing. Even if I had been Dunn, she was indiscreet. She hurt me a little twice-by a reference

"Ah!" exclaimed Sir Andrew on a high note, hopefully, "that's good! That's promising! I like that! Your amiable friend Miss Skene has made me more dubious than ever of what passes for oultivation and the discipline of conventional good breeding." "Nonsense!" answered Norah bluntly. "You ory for a disciplined speaking voice in one breath, and condemn discipline and good breeding in the next. You might at least be consistent."

"Please God, not!" he exclaimed. "I'd sooner be impulsive. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.'"

"She's impulsive enough, if that should please you. She says what comes into her head first."

"Better and better!" exclaimed Captain Cutlass, rubbing his hands together between his knees. "I never know myself what I'm going to say till I have said it;" and Miss Amelia turned up her eyes in despair at such a scatter

brained confession.

"But Penelope's impulsiveness," said Norah quietly, "is

other matter. Never mind! I could never have been so indiscreet as that myself, nor you. But of course we've had advantages."

"Oh, she's imprudent-"

"I'm glad to hear it," said Sir Andrew, laughing. "Prudence is nearly always fear. 'I was never afraid of anything -except myself,' she said when my horses jibbed, and I could believe her. She's a perfect Stoic. You've been trying to show show me her imperfections,

and

"I haven't," protested Norah. -I find they're all virtues. She's independent, contradictory, self-willed, confident in her own convictions, spontaneous, with no duplicity, clever. I believe a year of your society and the run of your book-shelves would make her perfect."

"But that would be to spoil her, wouldn't it, Andy?" said Norah mockingly. "You wouldn't have Penelope inhuman?"

"You don't exactly catch what I mean," said Captain Cutlass, looking with abstraction at his cousin's profile and a little curl of hair upon her temple.

For a month the room where

Penelope lay was the heart of the house; for every house has a special chamber whence the pulse of it is derived, even if it only be the kitchen. She had kicked Mrs Powrie's pillows to the foot of her bed, impatient at the very sight of embroidered monograms representing weary hours of foolish fancywork that spoiled the pillow for its proper purpose, and sat for hours reading Miss Amelia's novels. Mrs Powrie would go in to her, and be, for twenty minutes at a time, a kind of mother; Norah's frequent, longer visits, were the visits of a sister, and made the days too short: a broken limb seemed to be the best of fortune.

He

By-and-by she could rise; a little later, venture out of doors to see the gold of the lilies and hear the lark and the mavis singing, and no longer could her meeting with her enemy be averted. came upon her one day sitting under the verandah. There is a happy eye continually making pictures out of things familiar, even commonplace, and Captain Cutlass, coming on her suddenly, thought the unpretentious front of his house enlivened by her presence. It seemed as if she had been there for years-since the old unrepenetrable times when he was a sailor coming home with eyes sea-wearied, to look again with delight on the green of the rhododendrons. Jean had sat there sometimes; Norah often-how like, in some respects, the stranger was to his cousin!

"I'm delighted to see you

"Pardon me, said Sir Andrew softly; "that was not what I was thinking of; I was alluding to your accident. I've said all I mean to say about-about the other thing. That's past; that's finished. Fugit! I've forgotten all about it. And now I hope we're going to be friends. Why not?" He beamed on her so jovially, so far from any spirit of contrition, that she had to smile.

"Why not?" she replied. "Except that you-you told me a lie to begin with. I didn't like it. I don't like it. I suppose it's because I never could lie myself. I've tried it; sometimes it would be useful, but somehow it makes you feel as if you were dirty. I'm always for the downright truth!"

She spoke with a flurried ardenoy, breathing short between her sentences, looking him straight in the eyes without a quiver of her lashes, and he was seized with a tremendous admiration.

"That is right!" he said, "absolutely right! And I hope that you will learn by-and-by that dissimulation is as dis

tasteful to myself as it is to you. Why! Fancy Farm is quite an inappropriate name for this place; it is the palace of truth. Norah's exactly like you in that particular; she hates any form of falsehood, either sentimentalism or affectation, and I'm-" He stopped, reflected for a moment, and chuckled. "I reserve the right to be harmlessly mendacious when the wind's north-west. I like you!"

He delivered this finding with a hot impetuosity, and she could not doubt the candour of his eyes; but neither could she forego the obvious

retort.

"That's nice!" she said. "But I suppose the wind's north-west at present.'

He was charmed; he had never before met any one quite like her, except in some respects his cousin. She made him think of the free wild moor and morning walks there, for folk to Captain Cutlass often had some spirit of a certain place and weather. For half-an-hour they sat together in the forenoon sun; Miss Amelia, disapproving at a window, wondered at what they laughed so much. Penelope put all his whimsical ideas to the test of prose, like another Jamie Birrell; he delighted in her spirit of dissent, in one who spoke without reserve, with the bold unconsciousness of childhood,

"I envy Miss Skene the stimulation of your contradic

tion," he declared, and a shadow came to her face.

I

"Miss Skene," she replied, "will have to dispense with that sort of stimulus in future; I'm not going back to her. told her so before she left, and she probably doesn't believe it, but I always ride when I saddle, as my father says."

"Norah!" he cried, running into the house, and his cousin came hurriedly to see what caused this peremptory manner.

"Do you know," he asked eagerly, "that Penelope is not going back to your friend Miss Skene?"

"Idon't," said Norah, smiling. "She seems to have taken you into her confidence again pretty readily, considering the way you have already abused it.'

"You must keep her here!" he went on impetuously.

"In what capacity?" asked his cousin quietly.

"You are as much in need of a companion as Miss Skene."

"Not quite," she replied. "I've always you and Aunt Amelia, and there's often Reginald. I like Penelope immensely, she's so like myself in some respects, and seems sometimes to remind me of a sister I never had. But I couldn't engage the girl who saved my life to put up my hair, even if I didn't find it better for my health to do so for myself."

"If you don't make some arrangement whereby she'll stay, I'll marry her, offhand, myself!" said Captain Cutlass.

So sings the enthusiastic Hog Hunter, and I think it must be granted that he has more warrant for allowing the craze to obsess his mind, and absorb his being for the time, than many others who take up

a craze.

For the Mighty Boar is a foeman worthy of any man's steel, and has from time immemorial been recognised as one of the 'cutest and most savage of all the animals that man pursues. The wild boar fears neither man nor beast, nor beast, and when really tackled on anything like fair terms, and brought to bay, you will find -possibly to your cost-how true the verse of the old song is

"See how he flashes his fiery eye,
Ready to cut, to thrust, to die.
A boar who will charge like the Light
Brigade

Is the bravest brute God ever made;'

also, that you have got to look out to hold your own with him.

The two terms applied to the chase of the Wild Boar-Hoghunting and Pig-stickingare both singularly unhappy. Neither in any way gives you the slightest idea of what the gallop after, fight, and death of the old grey boar really mean. It is no child's-play, and though, when age and weight begin to tell, and you get a bit slow in the first burst after him, you can have lots of fun riding cunning and getting up for the

fight at the end, still you find that

"Youth's daring spirit, manhood's fire,
Firm hand and eagle eye,
Do they require who dare aspire
To see the wild boar die."

In all true sport there must be an element of danger to give it real zest, though there is also enormous fascination in pitting your wits and woodcraft against the instinctive knowledge of self-preservation that all wild animals possess, and by your own exertions out - manoeuvring them; but where there is conflict there must necessarily be many details which may appear cruel but are born of the necessity of the moment, and unavoidable. No real sportsman is cruel, and he will always eliminate all the cruelty he can from the sport he pursues. He does not kill for the pleasure of killing, and, when he kills, he kills as cleanly and as quickly as he can, and will never leave an animal wounded if he can help it. Should it be his fate, he is ready to accept his share of any risk or pain that may come his way or be inflicted on him in his pursuit of it.

If a wild boar makes up his mind that he intends to go one way, he'll go, whoever or whatever obstacle may be in his front. It seems hardly credible to a man who has not actually ridden pig, that, given 100