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“Did Mr. Miles take all these?” he asked, lightly; he was forced to speak so before her father: the restraint was natural, though he marvelled afterwards that he had been able to maintain it so long.

Alice, however, read him wrong. She was prepared for pique in her old lover, and imagined it before it existed. She answered with marked coldness:

“A good many of them.”

This time Dick detected the unpleasant ring in her words he could not help but detect it. A pang shot to his heart. His first (and only) impression of Miles, which had fled from his mind (with all other impressions) while talking to her, swiftly returned. He had used the man’s name, a minute ago, without its conveying anything to his mind; he used it now with a bitterness at heart which crept into his voice.

“And don’t you return the compliment? I see no photographs of Mr. Miles here; and he would look so well in one.”

“He has never been taken in his life and never means to be. Now, Dick, you have seen them all,” she added quite softly, her heart smiting her; and with that she rolled all the prints into one little cylinder. Dick was in that nervous state in which a kind word wipes out unkindness the moment it is spoken, and the cloud lifted at once from his face. They were silent for more than a minute. Colonel Bristo quietly left the room.