You ought
to stand open all day. Really, I often miss you at lunch time."
"My dear Beatrice!" said Mrs. Kennett Hipgrave, with that peculiar
lift of her brows that meant, "How naughty the dear child is! Oh, but
how clever!"
"It's all right," said Hamlyn, meekly. "I'm awfully happy to give you
a dinner, anyhow, Miss Beatrice."
Now, I had nothing to say on this subject, but I thought I would just
make this remark:
"Miss Hipgrave," said I, "is very fond of a dinner."
Beatrice laughed. She understood my little correction.
"He doesn't know any better, do you?" said she, pleasantly, to Hamlyn.
"We shall civilize him in time, though. Then I believe he'll be nicer
than you, Charlie. I really do. You're--"
"I shall be uncivilized by then," said I.
"Oh, that wretched island!" cried Beatrice. "You're really going?"
"Most undoubtedly. By the way, Hamlyn, who's your friend?"
Surely this was an innocent enough question; but little Hamlyn went
red from the edge of his clipped whisker on the right to the edge of
his mathematically equal whisker on the left.
"Friend!" said he, in an angry tone. "He's not a friend of mine. I
only met him on the Riviera."
"That," I admitted, "does not, happily, constitute in itself a
friendship."
"And he won a hundred louis of me in the train between Cannes and
Monte Carlo.
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