"My Miss Maliphant! Really I must protest against your accrediting me with such a possession. But look here, don't disappoint us all; and you won't be dull either, there are lots of people coming. Dicky Brown, for one."
"Oh! will he be there?" brightening visibly.
"Yes," rather gloomily, and perhaps a little sorry that he has said anything about Mr. Browne's possible arrival—though to feel jealousy about that social butterfly is indeed to sound the depths of folly; "you like him?"
"I love him," says Miss Kavanagh promptly and with sufficient enthusiasm to restore hope in the bosom of any man except a lover.
"He is blessed indeed," says he stiffly. "Beyond his deserts I can't help thinking. I really think he is the biggest fool I ever met."
"Oh! not the biggest, surely," says she, so saucily, and with such a reprehensible tendency towards laughter, that he gives way and laughs too, though unwillingly.
"True. I'm a bigger," says he, "but as that is your fault, you should be the last to taunt me with it."
"Foolish people always talk folly," says she with an assumption of indifference that does not hide her red cheeks. "Well, go on, who is to be at the Court besides Dicky?"
"Lady Swansdown."
"I like her too."