re
for the most part small things, but they were things that kept him
before the eye of society, and found favour in that eye.

He was a good horseman, a good oarsman, a good swimmer, a good
cricketer. He played and sang; he was a first-rate amateur actor; he
was great at billiards and all games of skill; he could talk any
language society wanted him to talk--society not requiring a man to
excel in Coptic or Chinese, or calling upon him suddenly for Japanese
or Persian; he dressed with perfect taste, and without the slightest
pretence of dandyism; he could write a first-rate letter, and
caricature his dearest friends of last year in pen and ink for the
entertainment of his dearest friends of this year; he was known to have
contributed occasionally to fashionable periodicals, and was supposed
to have a reserve of wit and satire which would quite have annihilated
the hack writers of the day had he cared to devote himself to
literature.

Mrs. Tempest and her daughter had met the Captain early in the previous
spring among the Swiss mountains. He knew some of Mrs. Tempest's
Hampshire friends, and with no other credentials had contrived to win
her friendship. Vixen took it into her obstinate young head to detest
him. But then, Vixen, at seventeen and a half, was full of ridiculous
dislikes and irrational caprices. Mrs. Tempest, in her lonely and
somewhat depressed condition, considered the Captain a particularly
useful acquaintance. Miss McCroke was dubious, but finding any
expression of her doubts ungraciously received, took the safer line of
silence.

The ball in question was a charity ball at the Pavilion, a perfectly
unobjectionable ball. The list of patronesses bristled with noble
names. There was nothing to be said against Vixen's appearance there,
except Miss McCroke's objection that Squire Tempest's daughter and
heiress ought not to make her _debut_ in society at any public ball
whatever; ought, in a manner, hardly to be seen by the human eye as a
grown-up young lady, until she had been presented to her gracious
sovereign. But Mrs. Tempest had set her heart upon Vixen's going to the
ball; or, in other words, she had set her heart upon going herself. On
her way through Paris, in September, she had gone to Worth's--out of
curiosity, just to see what the great man's salons were like--and there
she had been tempted into the purchase of an artistic arrangement in
black silk and jet, velvet and passementerie. She did no