"So I think, ma'am."

These conversations were always short, for Rosa, though she was too kind
and gentle to snub the girl, was also too delicate to give the least
encouragement to her gossip.

But Rosa's was a mind that could be worked upon, and these short but
repeated eulogies were not altogether without effect.

At last the insidious Falcon, by not making his approaches in a way to
alarm her, acquired her friendship as well as her gratitude; and, in
short, she got used to him and liked him. Not being bound by any limit
of fact whatever, he entertained her, and took her out of herself
a little by extemporaneous pictures; he told her all his thrilling
adventures by flood and field, not one of which had ever occurred, yet
he made them all sound like truth; he invented strange characters, and
set them talking; he went after great whales, and harpooned one, which
slapped his boat into fragments with one stroke of its tail; then died,
and he hung on by the harpoon protruding from the carcass till a
ship came and picked him up. He shot a lion that was carrying off
his favorite Hottentot. He encountered another, wounded him with both
barrels, was seized, and dragged along the ground, and gave himself up
for lost, but kept firing his revolver down the monster's throat till at
last he sickened him, and so escaped out of death's maw; he did NOT say
how he had fired in the air, and ridden fourteen miles on end, at the
bare sight of a lion's cub; but, to compensate that one reserve, plunged
into a raging torrent and saved a drowning woman by her long hair, which
he caught in his teeth; he rode a race on an ostrich against a friend on
a zebra, which went faster, but threw his rider, and screamed with rage
at not being able to eat him; he, Falcon, having declined to run unless
his friend's zebra was muzzled. He fed the hungry, clothed the naked,
and shot a wild elephant in the eye; and all this he enlivened with
pictorial descriptions of no mean beauty, and as like South Africa as if
it had been feu George Robins advertising that continent for sale.

In short, never was there a more voluble and interesting liar by word of
mouth, and never was there a more agreeable creature interposed between
a bereaved widow and her daily grief and regrets. He diverted her mind
from herself, and did her good.

At last, such was the charm of infinite lying, she missed him on the
days he did not come, and was brighter when he did come and lie.