f all newcomers.

Just now they had pleasant quarters enough in York, had a couple of
hundred hunters, all in all, in their stalls, were showing the Ridings
that they could "go like birds," and were using up their second horses
with every day out, in the first of the season. A cracker over the best
of the ground with the York and Ainsty, that had given two first-rate
things quick as lightning, and both closed with a kill, had filled the
day; and they were dining with a fair quantity of county guests, and all
the splendor of plate, and ceremony, and magnificent hospitalities which
characterize those beaux sabreurs wheresoever they go. At one part of
the table a discussion was going on but they drank singularly little;
it was not their "form" ever to indulge in that way; and the Chief, as
dashing a sabreur as ever crossed a saddle, though lenient to looseness
in all other matters, and very young for his command, would have been
down like steel on "the boys," had any of them taken to the pastime of
overmuch drinking in any shape.

"I can't get the rights of the story," said one of the guests, a hunting
baronet, and M. F. H. "It's something very dark, isn't it?"

"Very dark," assented a tall, handsome man, with a habitual air of the
most utterly exhausted apathy ever attained by the human features, but
who, nevertheless, had been christened, by the fiercest of the warrior
nations of the Punjaub, as the Shumsheer-i-Shaitan, or Sword of the Evil
One, so terrible had the circling sweep of one back stroke of his, when
he was quite a boy, become to them.

"Guard cut up fearfully rough," murmured one near him, known as "the
Dauphin." "Such a low sort of thing, you know; that's the worst of it.
Seraph's name, too."

"Poor old Seraph! He's fairly bowled over about it," added a third.
"Feels it awfully--by Jove, he does! It's my belief he paid those Jew
fellows the whole sum to get the pursuit slackened."

"So Thelusson says. Thelusson says Jews have made a cracker by it. I
dare say! Jews always do," muttered a fourth. "First Life would have
given Beauty a million sooner than have him do it. Horrible thing for
the Household."

"But is he dead?" pursued their guest.

"Beauty? Yes; smashed in that express, you know."

"But there was no evidence?"

"I don't know what you call evidence," murmured "the Dauphin." "Horses
are sent to England from Paris; clearly shows he went to Paris.
Marseilles train smashes; twenty people gro