I have seen small boys do-or walk through a heap of autumn leaves."

Yet she had never done it. Dorothy Harcourt was not formed upon so conventional a mold, and had never been restrained by the fear of what "people would say."

"What people would say" was indeed to her an unwritten, unknown law. She had had her laws made for her by the circumstances of her life, and the instincts of her nature had helped to enforce them. It was in the nature of things that she should know the value of the social amenities.

Perhaps the social amenities save many lives from harshness and brutality-lives that would be bitterness and torture, did not the social amenities exact courtesy and politeness from even the foes in one's own household. The social amenities are very beautiful. They veil the hideous

enemies, they conceal

faults of our friends and our own bad tempers, and prevent us from giving way to unbecoming emotions. But the social amenities are responsible for much unhappiness, too many lies, and three quarters of the insincerity among men and women of the world. Dorothy Harcourt believed in the social amenities, with all their legions of error and deceit, but

there were seasons and times when she would like to have stepped from their trammels and have said what was in her heart to the men who paid her court: "How I hate you!" or perhaps sometimes, "If you would but meet me with the frankness which you show to commonplace women, without the chaff of light talk or the surfeit of adulation, I might be-just a woman like the rest!"

Bradley had no affectations. Perhaps he agreed with Mrs. Glegg that a certain indifference to man-ners was included in the Almighty's scheme of good families. Still, he had never talked to Dorothy as he was talking to Barbara. She could not help observing that Bradley did not push the boughs back for Barbara, but let her do it herself. There was a degree of domesticity in their conduct toward each other which Dorothy could not but observe, not critically, but covetously, as indicating that they had long passed that stage of friendship where acts of mere courtesy were needed to testify regard. Yet she herself might not have pardoned this defection in any other man.

She did not know why she would like to have Bradley treat her differently from other men, yet she longed to have him take her presence as a mat

ter of course, as he did Barbara's. No man had ever paid her that equivocal compliment. She always seemed to impress herself upon them as a foreigner, for whom the conditions of being must be altered. Although she had resented Bradley's plain speaking with regard to her father, she could not deny that it had helped her to separate him from other men, and to believe that his interest in her was more than impersonal.

To Barbara, Bradley was so simply the boy friend of her childhood, around whom there was no shadow of a sentimental halo, that the possibility of his ever aspiring to Dorothy, whom she had elevated to the rank of unapproachable divinities, would have been at once ludicrous and preposterous had it for the moment occurred to her.

So, saying nothing in particular-that the day was fine and the foliage beautiful; that the oaks were turning superbly, that white one taking on a beautiful russet, that red one, a deeper shade; she was going on the river? Yes; well, the lights below the bend were gorgeous; it was well to make the most of the weather; no-she was not going their way, but down to the boat-house; the chestnuts were ripe, yes, and the children would do well to look for shag-barks; they had permission

to gather as many as they liked--Miss Harcourt passed on to the boat-house.

Bradley's boat was moored there, telling that when he had walked home with Barbara, he would return. By that time she would be far down the river. The tide was going out. Ordinarily, she would row out against it, and drift back with it; but Bradley knew this, and she would to-day vary her habit, and row with the tide beyond the possibility of his overtaking her.

"Irrational nature of our womanhood, that blushes one way, feels another, and prays, perhaps,

another!"

CHAPTER VIII.

CHILDREN'S FANCIES.

"DI," said Queenie Allen, that tall, brown-eyed sovereign of the little clan, to Hester, called Diogenes, because of her wisdom. "Di," said Queenie, "I think Miss Bender has a lover," and her brown eyes were big with the importance of the discovery.

"Well, what of that?" Di answered without enthusiasm. "Isabel of Croye had Quentin Durward; Evelyn de Berenger, Damian de Lacy. Is Miss Bender's lover a knight of high degree, and will he do valiant deeds for her?"

"Don't be such a moon-calf, Di." Hester was slightly transcendental at times, and Queenie was eminently practical and consequently scornful. "Of course, they aren't like that nowadays, Di. Lovers aren't knights, fighting duels and tournaments. They're only just men like papa and Uncle