king to me was the only thing that consoled
him for having to dine with you and to dance with Lady Shropshire.'

'Charles is jealous,' drawled the Duke.

'Of her Grace?' asked Miss Dacre, with much anxiety.

'No; but Charles is aged, and once, when he dined with me, was taken for
my uncle.'

The ladies retired, and the gentlemen sat barbarously long. Sir Chetwode
Chetwode of Chetwode and Sir Tichborne Tichborne of Tichborne were two
men who drank wine independent of fashion, and exacted, to the last
glass, the identical quantity which their fathers had drunk half a
century before, and to which they had been used almost from their
cradle. The only subject of conversation was sporting. Terrible shots,
more terrible runs, neat barrels, and pretty fencers. The Duke of St.
James was not sufficiently acquainted with the geography of the mansion
to make a premature retreat, an operation which is looked upon with an
evil eye, and which, to be successful, must be prompt and decisive,
and executed with supercilious nonchalance. So he consoled himself by
a little chat with Lord Mildmay, who sat smiling, handsome, and
mustachioed, with an empty glass, and who was as much out of water as he
was out of wine. The Duke was not very learned in Parisian society; but
still, with the aid of the Duchess de Berri and the Duchess de Duras,
Leontine Fay, and Lady Stuart de Rothesay, they got on, and made out the
time until Purgatory ceased and Paradise opened.

For Paradise it was, although there were there assembled some thirty or
forty persons not less dull than the majority of our dull race, and in
those little tactics that make society less burdensome perhaps even less
accomplished. But a sunbeam will make even the cloudiest day break into
smiles; a bounding fawn will banish monotony even from a wilderness; and
a glass of claret, or perchance some stronger grape, will convert even
the platitude of a goblet of water into a pleasing beverage, and so May
Dacre moved among her guests, shedding light, life, and pleasure.

She was not one who, shrouded in herself, leaves it to chance or fate
to amuse the beings whom she has herself assembled within her halls.
Nonchalance is the _metier_ of your modern hostess; and so long as
the house be not on fire, or the furniture not kicked, you may be
even ignorant who is the priestess of the hospitable fane in which you
worship.

They are right; men shrink from a fussy woman. And few can aspire to