d Catkin named other dishes, there was the right after-dinner
ring in Victor's ears, thanks to the woman of the world who had travelled
round to nature and led the shackled men to deliver themselves heartily.
One tap, and they are free. That is, in the moments after dinner, when
nature is at the gates with them. Only, it must be a lady and a
prevailing lady to give the tap. They need (our English) and will for the
ages of the process of their transformation need a queen.

Skepsey, bag in hand, obeyed the motion of his master's head and followed
him.

He was presently back, to remain with the ladies during his master's
perusal of letters. Nataly had decreed that he was not to be troubled; so
Nesta and mademoiselle besought him for a recital of his French
adventures; and strange to say, he had nothing to tell. The journey,
pregnant at the start, exciting in the course of it, was absolutely blank
at the termination. French people had been very kind; he could not say
more. But there was more; there was a remarkable fulness, if only he
could subordinate it to narrative. The little man did not know, that time
was wanted for imagination to make the roadway or riverway of a true
story, unless we press to invent; his mind had been too busy on the way
for him to clothe in speech his impressions of the passage of incidents
at the call for them. Things had happened, numbers of interesting minor
things, but they all slipped as water through the fingers; and he being
of the band of honest creatures who will not accept a lift from fiction,
drearily he sat before the ladies, confessing to an emptiness he was far
from feeling.

Nesta professed excessive disappointment. 'Now, if it had been in
England, Skips!' she said, under her mother's gentle gloom of brows.

He made show of melancholy submission.

'There, Skepsey, you have a good excuse, we are sure,' Nataly said.

And women, when they are such ladies as these, are sent to prove to us
that they can be a blessing; instead of the dreadful cry to Providence
for the reason of the spread of the race of man by their means! He
declared his readiness, rejecting excuses, to state his case to them, but
for his fear of having it interpreted as an appeal for their kind aid in
obtaining his master's forgiveness. Mr. Durance had very considerately
promised to intercede. Skepsey dropped a hint or two of his naughty
proceedings drily aware that their untutored antipathy to the manly art
would