lways wish; but I was thinking of Cos, there--milk-posset, as
little Eardley in the troop says they called him at Eton--I was wishing
he could see Levinge and Castlereagh, just as _epouvantails_, to make
him turn and flee as the French noblesse did when they saw their cousins
and brothers strung up a la lanterne."

"Wasn't it very strange," Blanche was saying to me at the same time,
"that Cecil never mentioned Sydney? I've so often spoken of him, told
her his troop, and all about him. (He has always been so kind to me,
though he is eighteen years older--just twice my age.) Besides, I found
her one day looking at his picture in the gallery, so she must have
known it was the same Colonel Vivian, mustn't she Captain Thornton?"

"I should say so. Have you known her long?"

"No. We met her at Brighton this August with that silly woman, Mrs.
Coverdale. All her artifices and falsehoods annoy Cecil so; Cecil
doesn't mind saying she's not rich, she knows it's no crime."

"C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute," said I.

"Don't talk in that way," laughed Blanche. "That's bitter and sarcastic,
like Sydney in his grand moods, when I'm half afraid of him. I am sure
Cecil couldn't be nicer, if she were ever such an heiress. Mamma asked
her for Christmas because she once knew Mr. St. Aubyn well, and Cecil is
not happy with Mrs. Coverdale. False and true don't suit each other. I
hope Sydney will like her--do you think he does?"

That was a question I could not answer. He admired her, of course,
because he could not well have helped it, and had done so in Canada; and
he was talking to her now, I dare say, to force her to acknowledge that
he _was_ more amusing than Horace Cos. But he seemed to me to weigh her
in a criticising balance, as if he expected to find her wanting--as if
it pleased him to provoke and correct her, as one pricks and curbs a
beautiful two-year old, just to see its graceful impatience at the check
and the glance of its wild eye.

II.

THE CANADIAN'S COLD BATH WARMS UP THE COLONEL.

Deerhurst was a capital house to spend a Christmas in. It was the house
of an English gentleman, with even the dens called bachelors' rooms
comfortable and luxurious to the last extent: a first-rate stud, a
capital billiard table, a good sporting country, pretty girls to amuse
one with when tired of the pink, the best Chablis and Chateau Margaux to
be had anywhere, and a host who would have liked a hundred people at his