and the Woman be described in his own words,
unusual and flippant as they sometimes are; for though he is a graduate
of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a brother of a Right Honourable, he
has conceived it his duty to emancipate himself in the matter of style
in language; and he has succeeded.

"It was autumn," he said, "all colours; beautiful and nippy on the
Height of Land; wild ducks, the which no man could number, and bear's
meat abroad in the world. I was alone. I had hunted all day, leaving my
mark now and then as I journeyed, with a cache of slaughter here, and a
blazed hickory there. I was hungry as a circus tiger--did you ever eat
slippery elm bark?--yes, I was as bad as that. I guessed from what I had
been told, that the Malbrouck show must be hereaway somewhere. I smelled
the lake miles off--oh, you could too if you were half the animal I am;
I followed my nose and the slippery-elm between my teeth, and came at a
double-quick suddenly on the fair domain. There the two sat in front of
the house like turtle-doves, and as silent as a middy after his first
kiss. Much as I ached to get my tooth into something filling, I wished
that I had 'em under my pencil, with that royal sun making a rainbow of
the lake, the woods all scarlet and gold, and that mist of purple--eh,
you've seen it?--and they sitting there monarchs of it all, like that
duffer of a king who had operas played for his solitary benefit. But
I hadn't a pencil and I had a hunger, and I said 'How!' like any
other Injin--insolent, wasn't it? Then the Man rose, and he said I was
welcome, and she smiled an approving but not very immediate smile, and
she kept her seat,--she kept her seat, my boy,--and that was the first
thing that set me thinking. She didn't seem to be conscious that there
was before her one of the latest representatives from Belgravia, not
she! But when I took an honest look at her face, I understood. I'm glad
that I had my hat in my hand, polite as any Frenchman on the threshold
of a blanchisserie: for I learned very soon that the Woman had been in
Belgravia too, and knew far more than I did about what was what. When
she did rise to array the supper table, it struck me that if Josephine
Beauharnais had been like her, she might have kept her hold on Napoleon,
and saved his fortunes; made Europe France; and France the world. I
could not understand it. Jimmy Haldane had said to me when I was asking
for Malbrouck's place on the compass,--'Don't