"It's false," exclaimed Crayshaw; "Mrs. Melcombe indeed! She's fat, she's three times too old for me."
"Why did you write it, then?" persisted Valentine. "I think this line,—
"'Lovely as waxwork is thy brow,'
"does you great credit. But what avails it! She is now another's. I got her wedding cards this morning. She is married to one Josiah Fothergill, and he lives in Warwick Square.
"Six—'The Black Eye, a Study from Life.'"
"But their things are not all fun, cousin Val," said Gladys, observing, not without pleasure, that Crayshaw was a little put out at Valentine's joke about Mrs. Melcombe. "Cray is going to be a real poet now, and some of his things are very serious indeed."
"This looks very serious," Valentine broke in; "perhaps it is one of them: 'Thoughts on Futurity, coupling with it the name of my Whiskers,'"
"There's his ode to Sincerity," proceeded Gladys; "I am sure you would like that."
"For we tell so many stories, you know," remarked Barbara; "say so many things that we don't mean. Cray thinks we ought not."
"For instance," said Johnnie, "sometimes when people write that they are coming to see us, we answer that we are delighted, when in reality we wish that they were at the bottom of the sea."