"You must teach me, Mr.Forbes.I only know what touches me, what I like--that's all I know in anything." '"It's all we any of us know," said Wallace airily.

"We begin with 'I like' and 'I don't like,' then we begin to be proud, and make distinctions and find reasons; but the thing beats us, and we come back in the end to 'I like' and 'I don't like.'" 'The lunch over, we strolled out along the common, through heather which as yet was a mere brown expanse of flowerless undergrowth, and copses which overhead were a canopy of golden oak-leaf, and carpeted underneath with primroses and the young up-curling bracken.

Presently through a little wood we came upon a pond lying wide and blue before us under the breezy May sky, its shores fringed with scented fir-wood and the whole air alive with birds.

We sat down under a pile of logs fresh-cut and fragrant, and talked away vigorously.

It was a little difficult often to keep the conversation on lines which did not exclude Miss Bretherton.
Forbes, the Stuarts, Wallace, and I are accustomed to be together, and one never realises what a freemasonry the intercourse even of a capital is until one tries to introduce an outsider into it.