ir monotonous or painful channel.

I was as much surprised at the good-humour with which he submitted to
his cousin's saucy talk; and, indeed, just then those black-panelled and
pictured walls, and that quaint, misshapen room, seemed to have exchanged
their stern and awful character for something wonderfully pleasanter to me,
notwithstanding the unpleasantness of the personal criticism to which the
plain-spoken lady chose to subject me.

Just at that moment Captain Oakley joined us. He was my first actual vision
of that awful and distant world of fashion, of whose splendours I had
already read something in the three-volumed gospel of the circulating
library.

Handsome, elegant, with features almost feminine, and soft, wavy, black
hair, whiskers and moustache, he was altogether such a knight as I had
never beheld, or even fancied, at Knowl--a hero of another species, and
from the region of the demigods. I did not then perceive that coldness of
the eye, and cruel curl of the voluptuous lip--only a suspicion, yet enough
to indicate the profligate man, and savouring of death unto death.

But I was young, and had not yet the direful knowledge of good and evil
that comes with years; and he was so very handsome, and talked in a way
that was so new to me, and was so much more charming than the well-bred
converse of the humdrum county families with whom I had occasionally
sojourned for a week at a time.

It came out incidentally that his leave of absence was to expire the
day after to-morrow. A Lilliputian pang of disappointment followed this
announcement. Already I was sorry to lose him. So soon we begin to make a
property of what pleases us.

I was shy, but not awkward. I was flattered by the attention of this
amusing, perhaps rather fascinating, young man of the world; and he plainly
addressed himself with diligence to amuse and please me. I dare say there
was more effort than I fancied in bringing his talk down to my humble
level, and interesting me and making me laugh about people whom I had never
heard of before, than I then suspected.

Cousin Knollys meanwhile was talking to papa. It was just the conversation
that suited a man so silent as habit had made him, for her frolic fluency
left him little to supply. It was totally impossible, indeed, even in our
taciturn household, that conversation should ever flag while she was among
us.

Cousin Knollys and I went into the drawing-room together, leaving the
gentlemen--