hey are free. That is, in the moments
after dinner, when nature is at the gates with them. Only, it must be a
lady and a prevailing lady to give the tap. They need (our English) and
will for the ages of the process of their transformation need a queen.

Skepsey, bag in hand, obeyed the motion of his master's head and
followed him.

He was presently back, to remain with the ladies during his master's
perusal of letters. Nataly had decreed that he was not to be troubled;
so Nesta and mademoiselle besought him for a recital of his French
adventures; and strange to say, he had nothing to tell. The journey,
pregnant at the start, exciting in the course of it, was absolutely
blank at the termination. French people had been very kind; he could not
say more. But there was more; there was a remarkable fulness, if only
he could subordinate it to narrative. The little man did not know, that
time was wanted for imagination to make the roadway or riverway of a
true story, unless we press to invent; his mind had been too busy on
the way for him to clothe in speech his impressions of the passage
of incidents at the call for them. Things had happened, numbers of
interesting minor things, but they all slipped as water through the
fingers; and he being of the band of honest creatures who will
not accept a lift from fiction, drearily he sat before the ladies,
confessing to an emptiness he was far from feeling.

Nesta professed excessive disappointment. 'Now, if it had been in
England, Skips!' she said, under her mother's gentle gloom of brows.

He made show of melancholy submission.

'There, Skepsey, you have a good excuse, we are sure,' Nataly said.

And women, when they are such ladies as these, are sent to prove to us
that they can be a blessing; instead of the dreadful cry to Providence
for the reason of the spread of the race of man by their means! He
declared his readiness, rejecting excuses, to state his case to them,
but for his fear of having it interpreted as an appeal for their
kind aid in obtaining his master's forgiveness. Mr. Durance had very
considerately promised to intercede. Skepsey dropped a hint or two of
his naughty proceedings drily aware that their untutored antipathy to
the manly art would not permit of warmth.

Nesta said: 'Do you know, Skips, we saw a grand exhibition of fencing in
Paris.'

He sighed. 'Ladies can look on at fencing! foils and masks! Captain
Dartrey Fenellan has shown me, and says, the Fr