"I say, Weeks, old man! why weren't you born then?" cried Rick, happily unconscious of all complications.
"Never had any luck," muttered the other, "except with the birds."
"Luck! I like that! You call it luck when you never miss; I assure you, Miss Strong," he continued, going up to where the despondent captain was standing, and addressing the nearest lady, "I was out with him yesterday, and he made me feel such a duffer. The prettiest shooting, and then he calls it luck!"
Cynthia Strong looked from one to the other of those two vigorous young faces before her, and then at the professor's pale one. A cold in the head is not becoming, and she sighed.
Rick, with the ring still in his possession, returned to Lady Maud.
"Isn't it quaint?" he said. "Don't you wish I could find another?"
"Because it would be yours, of course. How small it looks! I wonder if it would fit you."
"Miss Macdonald found it too large for her," remarked the professor, still more gloomily; "but it would be interesting, Lady Maud, to try whether it points to any improvement or deterioration--physical, of course--in the race."
"Perhaps you ladies would not mind experimenting 'Cinderella and the little glass slipper,'" laughed Eustace Gordon. "What is to be the prize, Endorwick--the ring?"
"My dear sir," gasped the professor, horrified for once out of his gallantry, "it's unique--positively unique."
"I'll tell you what," put in Rick eagerly, "if the professor will lend it to me for a couple of days, I'll copy it in silver. A florin would make it, and the inscriptions only scratched on. So now, then, ladies, if you please. Weeks, you do herald. Lady Maud, may we use the banner screen as a tabard?"
"What a boy that is!" said fat Lady Liddell to her next-door neighbour. "I've been here a fortnight, and never saw him out of temper or out of spirits. So different from most young people nowadays, who won't take the trouble to enjoy themselves."
"I knew it wouldn't go on anybody's finger but yours," said Rick with joyous confidence to his goddess when the competition was over. "Perhaps it wasn't quite fair, because I'd seen Aunt Will try it on so often, and her hands are tiny."
Lady Maud shook her head gravely. "I'm afraid it wasn't quite fair; but you must make me the ring, for all that."