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 confiding, gentle and tactful reader, in you! I said to her all that is hereinbefore set down, and, further, with broad and comprehensive sweeps of my walking-stick, I sketched “Sans Souci” for her, as I proposed to place it, upon the swell of ground. Meanwhile, I forgot that I was talking to a girl.

“And so,” I concluded, “I shall be as safe in the midst of these charming woods as ever was Professor Garnier in his cage in the African jungle. I shall not even be forced, as he was, to listen to the daily chatter of inferior beings, and I can defy the most enterprising of man-eating spinsters to lay her claws upon me!”

As I paused I felt that, perhaps, I had been too emphatic. A woman always takes general theories as immediately applicable to herself. Hers has none of that broad, liberal view of the abstract which distinguishes the masculine mind. I was not wrong. Miss Berrith’s reply bordered on the contemptuous.