Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV FLIRTED away, chattered away, danced away. Certainly Rossacre is no safe retreat for a timorous young man. Danger stalks him from a thousand pairs of eyes, shading all the way from blue to brown, from angel to coquette. There, in the nearest smilax bower, sits a tearing beauty who would have made a Reynolds, a Romney still greater. How they would have gloried in her fresh cheeks, in her mass of gold hair! What would they not have made her blues say — so demure but so sure of their power, and so mischievous in its employment ! "Who is it? Who is it?" you demand of Claverson. "Isn't she a pippin! Sylvia Banks. The boys call her 'Silvery.' Her father has a bit of coin, you know." Pippin indeed! "Silvery" forsooth! Already you are jealous of the half dozen puppies who sport about her, without the wit to know, as you do, how rare anywhere is such superlative sweetness! If Mr. Penning has turned away from that, you have a burning opinion of his taste — or a burning curiosity to meet his later choice! "Eh, Sylvia?" one of the puppies is saying. "Off with the old love, on with the new. I saw him with you on the links yesterday. And my word, it took you four hours to make the round. Eh, Sherry?" And he points his clumsy innuendo with a hearty dig in the ribs of a handsome laughing devil standing by. What wouldn't you give to have Sherry's good reason for blushing so proudly, for inspiring Sylvia's pretty pretended frown! "Was it four lost balls, or one lost heart, that took you so long?" another idiot gibbers. It isn't witty. It isn't deep. A cynic like Claver- son laughs at such frisking of kitten and puppy, this absolute of unimportance, and thinks it praiseworthy and superior to forget that in his own case he solved the principal question of his lif...