"He doesn't know any better, do you?" said she, pleasantly, to Hamlyn. "We shall civilize him in time, though. Then I believe he'll be nicer than you, Charlie. I really do. You're—"
"I shall be uncivilized by then," said I.
"Oh, that wretched island!" cried Beatrice. "You're really going?"
"Most undoubtedly. By the way, Hamlyn, who's your friend?"
Surely this was an innocent enough question; but little Hamlyn went red from the edge of his clipped whisker on the right to the edge of his mathematically equal whisker on the left.
"Friend!" said he, in an angry tone. "He's not a friend of mine. I only met him on the Riviera."
"That," I admitted, "does not, happily, constitute in itself a friendship."
"And he won a hundred louis of me in the train between Cannes and Monte Carlo."
"Not bad going, that," observed Denny, in an approving tone.
"Is he, then, un grec?" asked Mrs. Hipgrave, who loves a scrap of French.