oung opponent,
her cheeks hot and her eyes bright. "No good was ever yet done to a man
by proclaiming his faults right and left. _I_ should like you much
better, Mr. Ruskinstone, if you said, candidly, I don't like my cousin,
and I have never forgiven him for thrashing me at Rugby, and playing
football better than I did."

Eusebius winced at this little touch up of his bygone years, but he
smiled a benign, superior, pitying smile. "Such petitesses, I thank
Heaven, are utterly beneath me, and I should have fancied Miss Gordon
was too generous to suppose them. God forbid that I should envy poor
Vaughan his dazzling qualities. I sorrow over him as a relative and a
precious human soul, but as a minister of our holy Church I neither can,
nor will, countenance his gross violations of all her divinest laws."
With which peroration the Warden, with a sigh, took up a work on "The
Early English Piscini and Aspersoria," and became immersed therein.

"Poor Mr. Vaughan!" cried Nina, impatiently. "Probably he is too wise to
concern himself about what people buzz in his absence, or else he need
be cased in mail to avoid being stung to death with the musquito bites
of scandal."

Gordon came down on her with his heavy artillery. "Silence, Nina! you do
not know what you are defending. I fear that no slander can darken Mr.
Vaughan's character more than he merits."

"A gambler--a roue--a lover of married woman, of dancing-girls,"
murmured Eusebius, in an aside, meant, like those on the stage, to tell
killingly with the audience.

Nina flushed as scarlet as the camellias in her bouquet, and put up her
head with a haughty gesture. "Here comes the subject of your
vituperation, Mr. Ruskinstone, so you can repeat your denunciations, and
favor him with a sermon in person--unless, indeed, the secular
recollections of Rugby intimidate the religious arm."

I fear something as irreverent as "Little devil!" rose to the Warden's
pious lips as he flashed a fierce glance at her from his pale-blue eyes,
for he loved not her, but the splendid _dot_ which the banker was sure
to pay down if his son-in-law were to his taste. He caught his cousin's
glance as he came into the salons, and in the superb scorn gleaming in
Ernest's dark eyes, Eusebius saw that they were not merely enemies,
but--rivals: a Warden with Church principles, all the cardinal virtues,
strict morality, and money; and a _Lion_ with Paris principles (if any),
great fascinations, debts,