ogized for
leaving them, adding that he would call upon Madame de Fleury an hour
later, and hoped he might have the pleasure of meeting them there.

M. de Bois proposed to Lord Linden that they, also, should postpone
their visit.

"As you please," answered his lordship, languidly. "I am perfectly at
leisure. I will go wherever you are going,--it does not matter where; I
am indifferent to place."

Lord Linden always _was_ at leisure, and always indifferent, and not
unfrequently attached himself to Gaston de Bois, and seemed disposed to
accompany him wherever he went.

His lordship was one of that vast race of _blase_ young noblemen whose
opportunities of enjoyment had never been circumscribed, except by the
absence of the capacity to enjoy, and who, as a natural sequence, were
continually oppressed with a sense of satiety, enervated by the noonday
sunshine of unbroken prosperity, and thoroughly weary of their own
existence. When his brother-in-law had been appointed ambassador to
America, he had accompanied him to the United States with a vague idea
that he would be thrown in contact with warlike tribes of Indians, the
aborigines of the soil, whose novel and barbarous usages might afford
him some mediocre measure of excitement. We need hardly picture his
disappointment.

The ambassadors from foreign courts and their suites were as a matter of
course, thrown into constant communication with each other, and the
secretary of the French ambassador and the brother-in-law of the English
formed an acquaintance which ripened into an approach to intimacy. There
was no particular affinity between them, but Lord Linden liked M. de
Bois's society because he was a patient listener, and Lord Linden was
the opposite to taciturn; and Gaston, though he sometimes, as in the
present instance, felt his lordship an encumbrance, had too often been a
victim to ennui not to sympathize with a fellow-sufferer.

"Mademoiselle de Merrivale has a remarkably attractive face," said Lord
Linden. "I do not particularly fancy blondes; there is too much
milk-and-water and crushed rose-leaves in their general make-up; but, if
a blonde could, to my eyes, enter the charmed circle of the positively
beautiful, I would give her admission."

Gaston, who had fallen into a pleasant revery, was quickly roused by
this observation, and exclaimed, with an indignant intonation, "Not
admit a _blonde_ into the circle of the beautiful? Can anything be
lovelier th