“You are uncanny,” proclaimed Honora, with conviction.

“I told you you wouldn’t like Quicksands,” said he.

“I’ve never said I didn’t like it,” she replied.  “I can’t see why you assume that I don’t.”

“You’re ambitious,” he said.  “Not that I think it a fault, when it’s more or less warranted.  Your thrown away here, and you know it.”

She made him a bow from the saddle.

“I have not been without a reward, at least,” she answered, and looked at him.

“I have,” said he.

Honora smiled.

“I’m going to be your good angel, and help you get out of it,” he continued.

“Get out of what?”

“Quicksands.”

“Do you think I’m in danger of sinking?” she asked.  “And is it impossible for me to get out alone, if I wished to?”

“It will be easier with my help,” he answered.  “You’re clever enough to realize that—­Honora.”

She was silent awhile.

“You say the most extraordinary things,” she remarked presently.  “Sometimes I think they are almost—­”

“Indelicate,” he supplied.

She coloured.

“Yes, indelicate.”

“You can’t forgive me for sweeping away your rose-coloured cloud of romance,” he declared, laughing.  “There are spades in the pack, however much you may wish to ignore ’em.  You know very well you don’t like these Quicksands people.  They grate on your finer sensibilities, and all that sort of thing.  Come, now, isn’t it so?”

She coloured again, and put her horse to the trot.

“Onwards and upwards,” he cried.  “Veni, vidi, vici, ascendi.”

“It seems to me,” she laughed, “that so much education is thrown away on the stock market.”

“Whether you will be any happier higher up,” he went on, “God knows.  Sometimes I think you ought to go back to the Arcadia you came from.  Did you pick out Spence for an embryo lord of high finance?”

“My excuse is,” replied Honora, “that I was very young, and I hadn’t met you.”

Whether the lion has judged our heroine with astuteness, or done her a little less than justice, must be left to the reader.  Apparently he is accepting her gentle lashings with a meek enjoyment.  He assisted her to alight at her own door, sent the horses home, and offered to come in and give her a lesson in a delightful game that was to do its share in the disintegration of the old and tiresome order of things—­bridge.  The lion, it will be seen, was self-sacrificing even to the extent of double dummy.  He had picked up the game with characteristic aptitude abroad —­Quicksands had yet to learn it.

Howard Spence entered in the midst of the lesson.

“Hello, Brent,” said he, genially, “you may be interested to know I got that little matter through without a hitch to-day.”

“I continue to marvel at you,” said the lion, and made it no trumps.

Since this is a veracious history, and since we have wandered so far from home and amidst such strange, if brilliant scenes, it must be confessed that Honora, three days earlier, had entered a certain shop in New York and inquired for a book on bridge.  Yes, said the clerk, he had such a treatise, it had arrived from England a week before.  She kept it looked up in her drawer, and studied it in the mornings with a pack of cards before her.