done before, hunting and
shooting with Telfer down at Torwood.

"I've some countrywomen of yours here, Telfer," said Marc, after we'd
talked over his English loves, given him tiding of duchesses and
danseuses, and messages from no end of pretty women that he'd flirted
with the Christmas before. "They're some friends of my mother's, and
when they were at Baden-Baden last year, Virginie struck up a desperate
young lady attachment with one of them----"

"Are they good-looking?--because, if they are, they may be drysalters'
daughters, and I shan't care," interrupted Fred.

Telfer stroked his moustache with a contemptuous smile--_he_ wouldn't
have looked at a drysalter's daughter if she'd had all the beauty of
Amphitrite.

"Come and see," said Marc. "Virginie will think you're neglecting her
atrociously."

Horribly bored to be going to meet some Englishwomen who might turn out
to be Smiths or Joneses, and would, to a dead certainty, spoil all his
pleasure in pig-sticking, shooting, and ecarte, by flirting with him
whether he would or no, the Major strode along corridors and galleries
after Von Edenburgh. When at length we reached the salon where Virginie
and her mother and friends were, Telfer lifted his eyes from the ground
as the door opened, started as if he'd been shot, and stepped back a
pace or two, with an audible, "If that isn't the very devil!"

There, in a low chair, sat the Tressillian, graceful as a Sphakiote
girl, with a toilet as perfect as her profile, dark hair like waves of
silk, and dark eyes full of liquid light, that, when they looked
irresistible, could do anything with any man that they liked. Violet
certainly looked as unlike that unlucky ogre and scapegoat, the devil,
as a young lady ever could. But worse than a score of demons was she in
poor Telfer's eyes: to have come out to Essellau only to be shut up in a
country-house for a whole month with his pet aversion!--certainly it
_was_ a hard case, and the fierce lightning glance he flashed on her was
pardonable under the circumstances. But nobody's more impassive than the
Major: I've seen him charge down into the Sikhs with just the same calm,
quiet expression as he'd wear smoking and reading a novel at home; so he
soon rallied, bowed to the Tressillian, who gave him an inclination as
cold as the North Pole, shook hands with her aunt and cousins (three
women I hate: the mamma's the most dexterous of manoeuvrers, and the
girls the arrantest of fl