ocking bore for the Guards--such an
ugly story."

"It was uncommonly like him to get killed just when he did--best
possible taste."

"Only thing he could do."

"Better taste would have been to do it earlier. I always wondered he
stopped for the row."

"Oh, never thought it would turn up; trusted to a fluke."

He whom the Punjaub knew as the Sword of the Evil One, but who held in
polite society the title of Lord Kergenven, drank some hock slowly,
and murmured as his sole quota to the conversation, very lazily and
languidly:

"Bet you he isn't dead at all."

"The deuce you do? And why?" chorused the table; "when a fellow's body's
found with all his traps round him!"

"I don't believe he's dead," murmured Kergenven with closed, slumberous
eyes.

"But why? Have you heard anything?"

"Not a word."

"Why do you say he's alive, then?"

My lord lifted his brows ever so little.

"I think so, that's all."

"But you must have a reason, Ker?"

Badgered into speech, Kergenven drank a little more hock, and dropped
out slowly, in the mellowest voice in the world, the following:

"It don't follow one has reasons for anything; pray don't get logical.
Two years ago I was out in a chasse au sanglier, central France; perhaps
you don't know their work? It's uncommonly queer. Break up the Alps into
little bits, scatter 'em pell-mell over a great forest, and then set
a killing pack to hunt through and through it. Delightful chance for
coming to grief; even odds that if you don't pitch down a ravine, you'll
get blinded for life by a branch; that if you don't get flattened
under a boulder, you'll be shot by a twig catching your rifle-trigger.
Uncommonly good sport."

Exhausted with so lengthened an exposition of the charms of the venerie
and the hallali, he stopped, and dropped a walnut into some Regency
sherry.

"Hang it, Ker!" cried the Dauphin. "What's that to do with Beauty?"

My lord let fall a sleepy glance of surprise and of rebuke from under
his black lashes, that said mutely, "Do I, who hate talking, ever talk
wide of any point?"

"Why, this," he murmured. "He was with us down at Veille-roc--Louis
D'Auvrai's place, you know; and we were out after an old boar--not too
old to race; but still tough enough to be likely to turn and trust
to his tusks if the pace got very hot, and he was hard pressed at the
finish. We hadn't found till rather late, the limeurs were rather new to
the work, and the November day was