ot take in a tenth of all the wonders!"

Later, as an Indian gong sounded below, he came from his dressing-room
into the great bride-chamber where she stood, arrayed in satin, before
her mirror, hesitating as her fingers touched one after another of the
jewels scattered on the dressing-table under the waxen lights. Her maid
slipped away discreetly.

"Well?" he asked. He was resplendent in a suit of sapphire velvet, with
cravat and ruffles of old Spanish lace. "Is my love content with
her home-coming?"

She crossed her arms slowly.

"You are good to me," she said. "You do me too great honour, my lord."

He laughed, and catching up a necklace of diamonds from the
dressing-table, looped it across her throat, clasped it, leaned over her
shoulder and kissed her softly between the ear and the cheek's delicate
round. Their eyes met in the mirror.

"I invited the Quiney," he said gaily, "to give you a feeling of home
among these strange faces. She will not dine with us, though, unless
you choose."

"Let us be alone, to-night!" she pleaded.

"So be it. . . . But you shiver: you are cold. No? Then weary,
perhaps--yes, and hungry. I've a backwoods hunger, for my part.
Let us go down and dine."

BOOK IV.

LADY GOOD-FOR-NOTHING.

Chapter I.

BATTY LANGTON, CHRONICLER.

_From Batty Langton, Esquire, to the Hon. Horatio Walpole_.

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS,
January 21st, 1748.

. . . . . You ask me, my dear Sir, why I linger on year by year in this
land of Cherokees and Choctaws, as you put it, at the same time hinting
very delicately that now, with my poor old father in his grave and my
own youthful debts discharged, you see no enduring reason for this
exile. It is kind of you to be so solicitous: kinder still to profess
that you yet miss me. But that I am missed at White's is more than you
shall persuade me to believe. In an earlier letter, written when the
Gaming Act passed, you told me they were for nailing up an escutcheon to
mourn the death of play; they nailed up none for me. And I gather that
play has recovered, and Dick Edgcumbe holds my cards. I doubt if I
could endure to revisit St. James's--save by moonlight perhaps.
_Rappelez-moi_ to the waiters. They will remember me.

But in good deed, dear Sir, what should I be doing at home among the
Malvern Hills upon a patrimony of 800 pounds?--for to that it has
d