mastery over the bowling offered to him, of clean and well-timed hitting without fear and without reproach, nothing has in my mind ever been so well worth watching as the performance of this young man Loder here upon our village green. We won our match of course, this same Loder proving himself a very catamount in the field, and on occasion bowling a stray over which generally resulted in the capture of a wicket, and when the wicket had fallen modestly retiring at the end of the over to his place, or what he chose to call his place, in the field, and there being rather ubiquitous than stationary.

But perhaps what pleased me most was that this lad, who did approve himself at all points of the game as a most excellent performer, did by his kind and courteous bearing so recommend himself to friend and foe alike, that it was John Horrocks who proposed three cheers for the young Oxonian at the conclusion of the game, and old Joe Higgins who insisted on presenting him with a bat bearing on a silver plate a suitable inscription. One explanatory remark offered by George Peters to John Horrocks will bear quotation :

"You see, John, that there M'Gregor he wears a blue coat because he rowed in the Eight, but that there blessed little Loder he've gotten one too, though he ain't a-wearing it to-day, all along of his having played in the Eleven."

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CHAPTER XVI.

IN THE VALLEY D'ARC.

Two years to look forward, two years of banishment, two years of the society of strangers, had seemed almost like an eternity to that thoroughly home-bred young person, Miss Marian Balfour, as she had sat singing sadly to herself in the little drawing-room of her father's home in Bayswater. But time had in this case once more proved that as of joyful days so of sorrowful, the delight or the horror of anticipation will often surpass the delight or the horror of realisation.

Time had sped on at his usual pace, that pace which seems so rapid to decaying, so dawdling to growing humanity; week had succeeded week, month had followed month, with silent celerity, and it now seemed almost difficult for the girl to realise that something rather less than a third and rather more than a quarter of a year was separating her from final emancipation. Not that the days of captivity had been in any sense days of mourning, for the twenty months had passed-so even she, looking forward with pleasure to the thought of returning to England, was fain to confess-like a delicious dream. How much she had really enjoyed it all, enjoyed it if not from the very first day,-for then she had been most abominably sea-sick as well as home-sick,from the very first week assuredly, after she had exchanged the dinginess and monotony of Bayswater for the peaceful

How

but joyous restfulness of the Château Marguerite! warmly she had been received into that dove's nest! How touching had been the fond motherly care of Gertie Ferrier's one-time governess, the elder Mdlle. Carron! How sweet the sympathetic companionship of the young half-sister, Mdlle. Pauline, dearer even as a playmate and confidante than any one of May's fellow-pensionnaires, bright and charming girls as these too were each in their own way! How fascinating were the courteous manners, and the quaint old-fashioned yet ever kindly politeness of the master of the house, the gallant old soldier who, with his hand on his heart, had imparted to Laurence Ferrier his conviction that, of the "sveet" and the "lofely" demoiselles who had ever sheltered beneath his daughter's wing in the Château Marguerite, the "sveetest" and the "lofeliest" and the dearest by far was one Miss Marian Balfour.

"She what you call light up the Château, she scatter-not lily, not carnation-oh, I have your English flower, she scatter roses in her path."

What a halcyon month, too, the August, a year gone now, when the Ferriers had taken a house in the neighbourhood, bringing May's father a willing visitor in their train, and the girl had spent so much of her time with them that M. Carron and pretty Pauline were quite jealous, and declared that "Monsieur le père" and "ces bons Ferriers" had no right to monopolise the society of their Mayflower and to steal the sunshine from the Château! In what good spirits her father had been, in what good health, in what brilliant colours had he painted the beauties of his new parsonage, and the peaceful quiet of a model country village where the few Dissenters that there were lived in charity with their neighbours of the Church, and black sheep with their bleatings and their bickerings were unknown!

"It is too much like the lap of luxury, as I was afraid it would be, my darling," he had said, affecting to grumble. "Then it is quite the place for you to live in at last, dear;"

and it seemed as she looked into the well-loved face that in these later days the old deep lines were being gradually ironed

out.

"And my patron is all that I had heard he was. And then there is Lady Betty-but you must ask Ferrier about her." And Laurence, when the question what sort of a girl Lady Betty was had been put to him, had confessed that in May's absence, missing, as he said, the pleasure of scolding and criticising some one, in addition to his wife of course, younger and more foolish than himself, he had more or less installed Lord Leuchars' daughter in May Balfour's place as the young creature to be criticised and scolded when occasion-rather rare occasion, to be sure-so offered.

"Yes, May, you will like her, perhaps grow to be very fond of her. Not a bit like yourself, as I call you on the whole a tolerably docile person: she is strong-minded, and yet I will not say too much so-a girl who has her dislikes as well as her likes, and is equally unwilling to be persuaded out of either."

This August the renewed visit of the English party, which had been contemplated, had fallen through owing to a chapter of accidents. It had been difficult to make arrangements in the first place; when made they had been unavoidably broken. The Bishop had chosen to fix a day in the latter end of the first week of August for the consecration of a new burial-ground at Barnwick, causing the postponement of Mr Balfour's holiday to the second week. Then Mrs Ferrier had been attacked by an obstinate summer cold, and again there had been a postponement, and as Mr Balfour had in any case intended to be back in his parish before the harvest thanksgiving, which promised to be settled for an earlier date than usual, the trip across the Channel had finally been altogether abandoned, and the Rector took no holiday at all.

To be sure it was disappointing to all parties, but by way of mitigating the disappointment in his daughter's case, Mr Balfour had fixed that she should return to England and

settle down in the new home a good fortnight earlier than she had expected. And to-day had come a letter from

Laurence Ferrier in which he announced his intention of taxing the hospitality of his good friends in the Château Marguerite for two or three days at the end of November, and then of escorting May back to England. And there was one particular paragraph in his letter which caused Miss Balfour to smile, and even to blush a little, as she sat reading it on her camp-stool under a shady tree in the prettily wooded Valley d'Arc.

"I write this from the Mote, where I am staying for two nights. Betty-we arrived at that stage of familiarity a year ago has forcibly annexed the coloured photograph you sent me, and refuses to part with it. She says-no, I won't tell you what she says, you are probably vain enough already."

What Lady Betty had in very truth said when Ferrier showed her the deftly coloured photograph, which offered, as things go, a very faithful presentment of Miss May Balfour, was after this manner :

"It is the face of an angel, Mr Ferrier. You may tell me that it is Miss Balfour till you are black in the face, but I tell you it is the face of an angel, and what is more, I am going to take it and hang it up in my room so that I can see it when I am in bed. It will make me feel good to look at it."

"There are Saxon angels and Norman angels, black fiends and white, my dear lady," said Ferrier, intensely pleased by the compliment paid to his favourite. "Now this happens to be a distinctly Saxon face, but——”

"Then I like Saxon," exclaimed Betty. "Oh, those blue eyes and that lovely floss-silk hair!"

"How you do interrupt a man. What I was going to say was that I met a young man the other day, and a very nice young man too, Betty; I took to him very much. I got his brother Dick, with whom I have some-eh-acquaintanceship, to bring him to dine with me. And-ah-were you going to speak?"

P