"How beautiful you are!" said Lord Verney.

He was sitting on a stool at Mrs. Bellairs\' feet. She had abandoned to him one plump taper-fingered hand. The gay little parlour of the Queen Square house was full of sunshine and of the screeching ecstasy of Mistress Kitty\'s canary bird.

"How beautiful you are!" said he; it was for the fourth time within the half-hour. Conversation between them had languished somehow.

Kitty Bellairs flung a sidelong wistful look upon her lover\'s countenance. His eyes, gazing upwards upon her, devoured her beauty with the self-same expression that she had found so entrancing earlier in the day. "Deep wells of passion," she had told herself then. Now a chill shade of misgiving crept upon her.

"His eyes are like a calf\'s," she said to herself suddenly.

*****

"How beautiful——" thus he began to murmur once again, when his mistress\'s little hand, twitching impatiently from his grasp, surprised him into silence.

"Oh dear! a calf in very truth," thought she. "Baah—baa ooh.... What can I have seen in him? \'Twas a sudden pastoral yearning....!"

"May I not hold your hand?" said he, shifting himself to his silken knees and pressing against her.

Yet he was a pretty boy and there was a charm undoubted in the freshness of this innocence and youth awakening to the first glimmer of man\'s passion.

"Delightful task——" she quoted under her breath, and once more vouchsafed him, with a sweep like the poise of a dove, her gentle hand.

As it lay in his brown fingers, she contemplated it with artistic satisfaction and played her little digits up and down, admiring the shape and colour of the nails, the delicate dimples at the knuckles. But Lord Verney\'s great boy\'s paw engulfed them all too quickly, and his brown eyes never wavered from their devout contemplation of her countenance.

"How——"

Mistress Kitty sprang to her feet.

"I vow," she cried, "\'tis my hour for the waters, and I had clean forgot them!"

She called upon her maid:

"Lydia, child, my hat!—Lord Verney, if it please you, sir, your arm as far as the Pump Room." ("At least," she thought to herself, "all Bath shall know of my latest conquest")

She tied her hat ribbons under her chin.

"How like you the mode?" said she. And, charmed into smiles again by the rosy vision under the black plumes, she flashed round upon him from the mirror. "Is it not, perhaps, a thought fly-away? Yet \'tis the latest. What says my Verney?"

The poor youth vainly endeavoured to discriminate and criticise.

"It is indeed a very fine hat," said he ... "and there seem to be a vast number of feathers upon it." He hesitated, stammered. "Oh, what care I for modes! \'Tis you, you——"

"What are you staring at, girl?" cried Mistress Bellairs sharply, to her Abigail. "Out with you!"

"Well, my Verney?" said she. "Mercy, how you look, man! Is anything wrong with my face?"

She tilted that lovely little piece of perishable bloom innocently towards him as she spoke. And the kiss she had read in his eyes landed with unprecedented success upon her lips.

"Why, who knows?" thought she, with a little satisfied smile, as she straightened her modish hat. "There may be stuff in the lad, after all!"

She took his arm. Dazed by his own audacity, he suffered her to lead him from the room. They jostled together down the narrow stairs.

"How beautiful you are!" said he; and kissed her again as they reached the sombre dark-panelled vestibule.

"Fie!" said she with a shade of testiness and pushed him back, as her little black page ran to open the door.

The kiss, like his talk, lacked any heightening of tone—and what of a lover\'s kiss that shows no new ardour, what of a vow of love that has no new colour, no fresh imagery? But the trees in Queen Square were lightly leafed with pale, golden-green. The sunshine was white-gold, the breeze fresh and laughing; the old grey town was decked as with garlands of Young Love.

"He is but new to it," she argued against her fleeting doubts, "and he is, sure, the prettiest youth in all Bath."

Love and Spring danced in Mistress Kitty\'s light heart and light heels as she tripped forth. And Love and Spring gathered and strove and sought outlet in Verney\'s soul as inevitably, and irresistibly, and almost as unconsciously as the sap in the young shoots that swayed under the caress of the breeze and amorously unfurled themselves to the sunlight.

*****

The Pump Room was cool and dim after the grey stone street upon which the young year\'s sunshine beat as fierce as its youth knew how. The water droned its little song as it welled up, faintly steaming.

"Listen to it," quoth Mistress Kitty. "How innocent it sounds, how dear it looks!"

With a smile she took the glass transferred to her by Verney, and: "Ugh!" said she, "how monstrous horrid it tastes, to be sure! \'Tis, I fear," she said, again casting a glance of some anxiety at her new lover\'s countenance, "a symbol of life."

"Yet," said he, "these waters are said to be vastly wholesome."

"Wholesome!" cried Mistress Kitty, sipping again, and again curling her nose upwards and the corners of her lips downwards, in an irresistibly fascinating grimace. "Wholesome, my lord! Heaven defend us! And what is that but the last drop to complete their odiousness! Wholesome, sir? I would have you know \'tis not for wholesomeness I drink." She put down her glass, undiminished save by the value of a bird\'s draught. "Do I look like a woman who needs to drink waters for \'wholesomeness?\'"

"Indeed, no," floundered he in his bewildered way.

"There are social obligations," said she, sententiously. "A widow, sir, alone and unprotected, must conform to common usage. And then I have another reason, one of pure sentiment."

She cocked her head and fixed her mocking eye upon him.

"My poor Bellairs," said she, "how oft has it not been my pleasure and my duty to fill such a glass as this and convey it to his lips? In his last years, poor angel, he had quite lost the use of his limbs!"

Lord Verney had no answer appropriate to these tender reminiscences; and Mistress Kitty, having, it seemed, sufficiently conformed to the usage of Bath, as well as sacrifice............