e don't shine with the small sword.'

'We had men neatly pinked for their slashings in the Peninsula.'

'We've had clever Irishmen.'

'Hot enough blood! This man Morsfield--have you crossed the foils with
him?'

'Goes at it like a Spaniard; though Spaniards in Paris have been found
wary enough.'

My lord hummed. 'Fellow looks as if he would easily lose his head over
steel.'

'He can be dangerous.'

The word struck on something, and rang.

Mrs. Lawrence had a further murmur within her lips. Her travelling eye
met Aminta's and passed it.

'But not dangerous, surely, if the breast is padded?' said Mrs. Pagnell.

'Oh no, oh no; not in that case!' Mrs. Lawrence ran out her voluble
assent, and her eyelids blinked; her fair boy's face was mischief at
school under shadow of the master.

She said to Weyburn: 'Are you one in the list--to give our military a
lesson? They want it.'

His answer was unheard by Aminta. She gathered from Mrs. Lawrence's
pleased sparkle that he had been invited to stand in the list; and the
strange, the absurd spectacle of a young schoolmaster taking the heroic
attitude for attack and defence wrestled behind her eyes with a suddenly
vivid first-of-May cricketing field, a scene of snowballs flying, the
vision of a strenuous lighted figure scaling to noble young manhood.
Isabella Lawrence's look at him spirited the bright past out of the
wretched long-brown-coat shroud of the present, prompting her to grieve
that some woman's hand had not smoothed a small tuft of hair, disorderly
on his head a little above the left parting, because Isabella
Lawrence Finchley could have no recollection of how it used to toss
feathery--wild at his games.

My lord hummed again. 'I suspect we 're going to get a drubbing. This
fellow here has had his French maitre d'armes. Show me your hand, sir.'

Weyburn smiled, and extended his right hand, saying: 'The wrist wants
exercise.'

'Ha! square thumb, flesh full at the nails' ends; you were a bowler at
cricket.'

'Now examine the palms, my lord; I judge by the lines on the palms,'
Mrs. Pagnell remarked.

He nodded to her and rose.

Coffee had not been served, she reminded him; it was coming in, so
down he sat a yard from the table; outwardly equable, inwardly cursing
coffee; though he refused to finish a meal without his cup.

'I think the palms do betray something,' said Mrs. Lawrence; and Aminta
said: 'Everything betrays.'

'No, my dear,' Mrs. Pagnell