ut he
betrayed no impatience; he sat and looked and meditated.

However, when dinner was over and the ladies had left the room, he had
to go and take his sister's place, so that he found himself in the thick
of the babble. Mr. Quirk was no longer goring spiders' webs; he was now
attacking a solid and substantial subject--nothing less than the
condition of the British army; and a pretty poor opinion he seemed to
have of it. As it chanced, the only person who had seen service was Lord
Rockminster (at Knightsbridge), but he did not choose to open his mouth,
so that Mr. Quirk had it all his way--except when Maurice Mangan thought
it worth while to give him a cuff or a kick, just by way of reminding
him that he was mortal. Ichabod, in silence, stuck to the port wine.
Quincey Hooper, the American journalist, drew in a chair by the side of
Lord Rockminster and humbly fawned. And meanwhile Quirk, head downward,
so to speak, charged rank and file, and sent them flying; arose again
and swept the heads off officers; and was just about to annihilate the
volunteers when Mangan interrupted him.

"Oh, you expect too much," he said, in his slow and half-contemptuous
fashion. "The British soldier is not over well-educated, I admit; but
you needn't try him by an impossible standard. I dare say you are
thinking of ancient days when a Roman general could address his troops
in Latin and make quite sure of being understood; but you can't expect
Tommy Atkins to be so learned. And our generals, as you say, may chiefly
distinguish themselves at reviews; but the reviews they seem to me to be
too fond of are those published monthly. As for the volunteers--"

"You will have a joke about them, too, I suppose," Quirk retorted. "An
excellent subject for a joke--the safety of the country! A capital
subject for a merry jest; Nero fiddling with Rome in flames--"

"I beg your pardon? Nero never did anything of the kind," Mangan
observed, with a perfectly diabolical inconsequence, "for violins
weren't invented in those days."

This was too much for Mr. Quirk; he would not resume argument with such
a trifler; nor, indeed, was there any opportunity; for Lord Rockminster
now suggested they should go into the drawing-room--and Ichabod had to
leave that decanter of port.

Now, if Maurice Mangan had come to this house to see how Lionel was
feted and caressed by "the great"--in order that he might carry the
tale down to Winstead to please the old folk and