He sat for hours afterwards recalling the tit-bits of a summary of his personal charms with which she had supplied him.
Mr.Chalk spent the time in preparations for the voyage, purchasing, among other necessaries, a stock of firearms of all shapes and sizes, with which he practised in the garden.

Most marksmen diminish gradually the size of their target; but Mr.Chalk, after starting with a medicine-bottle at a hundred yards, wound up with the greenhouse at fifteen.

Mrs.Chalk, who was inside at the time tending an invalid geranium, acted as marker, and, although Mr.Chalk proved by actual measurement that the bullet had not gone within six inches of her, the range was closed.
[Illustration: "Purchasing firearms, with which he practised in the garden."] By the time the alterations on the _Fair Emily_ were finished the summer was nearly at an end, and it was not until the 20th of August that the travellers met on Binchester platform.

Mrs.Chalk, in a smart yachting costume, with a white-peaked cap, stood by a pile of luggage discoursing to an admiring circle of friends who had come to see her off.

She had shut up her house and paid off her servants, and her pity for Mrs.
Stobell, whose husband had forbidden such a course in her case, provided a suitable and agreeable subject for conversation.