Mr.Saunders, fully warned against the American typewriter girl as a class, having read the most shocking jokes at her expense in the comic papers, was rather shy at the outset, but Britt gallantly came to Miss Pelham's defence and ultimate rescue by emphatically assuring Saunders that she was a perfect lady, guaranteed to cause uneasiness to no man's wife.
"But I have no wife," quickly protested Saunders, turning a dull red.
"The devil!" exclaimed Britt, apparently much upset by the revelation.
But of this more anon.
* * * * * Browne conducted the two young women across the drawbridge and to the sunlit edge of the terrace, where two servants awaited them with parasols.
"Isn't it extraordinary, the trouble one is willing to take for the merest glimpse of a man ?" sighed Lady Agnes.

"At home we try to avoid them." "Indeed ?" said pretty Mrs.Browne, with a slight touch of irony.

It was the first sign of the gentle warfare which their wits were to wage.
"There he is! See him ?" almost whispered Browne, as if the solitary, motionless figure at the foot of the avenue was likely to hear his voice and be frightened away.
The Enemy was sitting serenely on one of the broad iron benches just inside the gates to the park, his arms stretched out along the back, his legs extended and crossed.

The great stone wall behind him afforded shelter from the broiling sun; satinwood trees lent an appearance of coolness that did not exist, if one were to judge by the absence of hat and the fact that his soft shirt was open at the throat.

He was not more than two hundred yards away from the clump of trees which screened his watchers from view.