"No tea, thanks. There is Burnley waving at us. I think he has an engagement, and means me to be off."
"Not yet, surely. If you are not booked for anything you need not hurry."
"Thanks. I should be glad to stay. I say, Harry, there's no good dragging me to the Waymans, is there?"
"Besides," interposed Carol, as her mother approached, "he has not been introduced to mamma."
"I beg your pardon," said Burnley, posing himself with mock formality, "Mrs Silver, let me present to you my friend Yate Tyndall—he's poor but pleasant."
"The fact of poverty is an unpleasantness of itself," affirmed Yate, extending a hearty hand to Carol's mother.
The expression of the salutation was scarcely valedictory, and Harry Burnley found himself doomed to solitary departure.
II.
There was—after the manner of suburban vogue—a tennis club in Weytown. To this the élite of Weytown society, composed mostly of shelved officers in various degrees of dilapidation, and their growing families, belonged. Here the Burnleys and Silvers had met, from the years of teetotum to those of flirtation, and here, outside the cabalistically marked acre, in their search for truant tennis balls, had Carol and Rosser commenced the engagement which some said was serious, and others declared to be but a boy and girl pastime.
When the Burnleys' visitor, Yate Tyndall, appeared upon the scene, which he did almost immediately after his introduction to the Silvers, there was spoon diet for the gossips in plenty. Where Carol was, there the six feet two of the lumbering youth perambulated also; where she was not—and the colour of her caprices was changeable as the iridescence of soap-suds—there, pro tem., was the soldierly figure extinct.