lazy friars should be leading lives of indolence and
abundance in the midst of a hard-worked and ill-fed peasantry."

"Quite true; and on these wise grounds, as you call them, we have rooted
them out. We only wish that the game were more plenty, for the sport
amuses us vastly." And he clapped Stubber familiarly on the shoulder,
and laughed heartily at his jest.

It was in this happy frame of mind that Stubber always liked to leave
his master; and so, promising to attend to the different subjects
discussed between them, he bowed and withdrew.

CHAPTER XLIX. SOCIAL DIPLOMACIES

"What an insufferable bore, dear Princess!" sighed Sir Horace, as he
opened the square-shaped envelope that contained his Royal Highnesses
invitation to dinner.

"I mean to be seriously indisposed," said Madame de Sabloukoff; "one
gets nothing but chagrin in intercourse with petty Courts."

"Like provincial journals, they only reproduce what has appeared in the
metropolitan papers, and give you old gossip for fresh intelligence."

"Or, worse again, ask you to take an interest in their miserable
'localisms,'--the microscopic contentions of insect life."

"They have given us a sentry at the door, I perceive," said Sir Horace,
with assumed indifference.

"A very proper attention!" remarked the lady, in a tone that more than
half implied the compliment was one intended for herself.

"Have you seen the Chevalier Stubber yet?" asked Upton.

"No; he has been twice here, but I was dressing, or writing notes. And
you?"

"I told him to come about two o'clock," sighed Sir Horace. "I rather
like Stubber."

This was said in a tone of such condescension that it sounded as though
the utterer was confessing to an amicable weakness in his nature,--"I
rather like Stubber."

Though there was something meant to invite agreement in the tone, the
Princess only accepted the speech with a slight motion of her eyebrows,
and a look of half unwilling assent.

"I know he's not of _your_ world, dear Princess, but he belongs to that
Anglo-Saxon stock we are so prone to associate with all the ideas of
rugged, unadorned virtue."

"Rugged and unadorned indeed!" echoed the lady.

"And yet never vulgar," rejoined Upton,--"never affecting to be other
than he is; and, stranger still, not self-opinionated and conceited."

"I own to you," said she, haughtily, "that the whole Court here puts me
in mind of Hayti, with its Marquis of Orgeat and its Count Marmalad