"Depend upon it she will try to hook you."

"Oh, bother!" said Lord Lambeth.

"American girls are very clever," urged his companion.

"So much the better," the young man declared.

"I fancy they are always up to some game of that sort," Beaumont
continued.

"They can't be worse than they are in England," said Lord Lambeth
judicially.

"Ah, but in England," replied Beaumont, "you have got your natural
protectors. You have got your mother and sisters."

"My mother and sisters--" began the young nobleman with a certain
energy. But he stopped in time, puffing at his cigar.

"Your mother spoke to me about it, with tears in her eyes," said Percy
Beaumont. "She said she felt very nervous. I promised to keep you out of
mischief."

"You had better take care of yourself," said the object of maternal and
ducal solicitude.

"Ah," rejoined the young barrister, "I haven't the expectation of a
hundred thousand a year, not to mention other attractions."

"Well," said Lord Lambeth, "don't cry out before you're hurt!"

It was certainly very much cooler at Newport, where our travelers found
themselves assigned to a couple of diminutive bedrooms in a faraway
angle of an immense hotel. They had gone ashore in the early summer
twilight and had very promptly put themselves to bed; thanks to which
circumstance and to their having, during the previous hours, in their
commodious cabin, slept the sleep of youth and health, they began to
feel, toward eleven o'clock, very alert and inquisitive. They looked out
of their windows across a row of small green fields, bordered with
low stone walls of rude construction, and saw a deep blue ocean lying
beneath a deep blue sky, and flecked now and then with scintillating
patches of foam. A strong, fresh breeze came in through the curtainless
casements and prompted our young men to observe, generally, that it
didn't seem half a bad climate. They made other observations after they
had emerged from their rooms in pursuit of breakfast--a meal of which
they partook in a huge bare hall, where a hundred Negroes, in white
jackets, were shuffling about upon an uncarpeted floor; where the
flies were superabundant, and the tables and dishes covered over with a
strange, voluminous integument of coarse blue gauze; and where several
little boys and girls, who had risen late, were seated in fastidious
solitude at the morning repast. These young persons had not the morning
paper before them, but they were