I want you to help me in something, Cynthia.

You remember how you helped me out of one or two scrapes in the old days ?" They both laughed.

Cynthia remembered very well.

That scrape, for instance, with the seductive little granddaughter of the retired village school-master--a veritable Ancient of Days, who had been the witness of an unlucky kiss behind a hedge, and had marched up instanter, in his wrath, to complain to Lord Buntingford _grand-pere._ Or that much worse scrape, when a lad of nineteen, with not enough to do in his Oxford vacation, had imagined himself in love with a married lady of the neighbourhood, twenty years older than himself, and had had to be packed off in disgrace to Switzerland with a coach:--an angry grandfather breathing fire and slaughter.

Certainly in those days Philip had been unusually--remarkably susceptible.