ther and be all
right. You have plenty of time before you yet."

"My good fellow, what do you call plenty of time? Look at me--I'm as
bald as if I were a judge."

"Oh, bald! that's nothing. Everybody is bald nowadays."

"But I'm thirty-five! Thirty-five--think of that, young ladies! a
grizzled, grim old fogey--what is it Thackeray says?--all girls know
Thackeray--who on earth would marry me? My brother and his wife have
given me such a shockingly bad character. Some of it I deserved,
perhaps; some of it I didn't. They think I have disgraced the family
name, I dare say. What did the family name do for me I should like to
know? Out in Texas we didn't care much about family names."

"I entirely agree with your view of things, Mr. St. Paul," Mrs. Money
said in her soft melancholy tone. "England is destroyed by caste and
class. I honor a man of family who has the spirit to put away such
ideas."

"Oh, it would be all well enough if one were the eldest brother, and had
the money, and all that. I should like to be the Duke, I dare say, well
enough. But I can't be that, and I've been very happy hunting buffaloes
for months together, and no one but an old Indian to speak to. I don't
disgrace the Duke's family name, for I've dropped it, nor any courtesy
title, for I don't use any. I believe they have forgotten me altogether
in Keeton. Miss Grey tells me so."

"Excuse me," Minola said. "I didn't say that, for I didn't know. I only
said I didn't remember hearing of you by your present name; but I didn't
know any of the family at the Castle. We belonged to the townspeople,
and were not likely to have much acquaintance with the Castle."

"Except at election time--I know," St. Paul said with a laugh. "Well,
I'm worse off now, for they won't know _me_ even at election time."

Then the talk went off again under St. Paul's leadership, and almost by
his sole effort, to his adventurous life, and he told many stories of
fights with Indians, of vigilance committees, of men hanged for
horse-stealing, and of broken-down English scamps, who either got killed
or made their fortune out West. A cool contempt for human life was made
specially evident. "I like a place," the narrator more than once
observed, "where you can kill a man if you want to and no bother about
it." Perhaps still more evident was the contempt for every principle but
that of comradeship.

After dinner Mr. St. Paul only showed himself in the drawing-room for a
moment o