ou say to a mountain-top at dawn on a summer day?" asked
Madame Max Goesler.

"You make me shiver," said the Duke.

"Or a boat on a lake on a summer evening, or a good lead after hounds
with nobody else within three fields, or the bottom of a salt-mine,
or the deck of an ocean steamer, or a military hospital in time of
war, or a railway journey from Paris to Marseilles?"

"Madame Max Goesler, you have the most uncomfortable ideas."

"I have no doubt your Grace has tried each of them,--successfully.
But perhaps, after all, a comfortable chair over a good fire, in a
pretty room, beats everything."

"I think it does,--certainly," said the Duke. Then he whispered
something at which Madame Max Goesler blushed and smiled, and
immediately after that she followed those who had already gone in
to lunch.

Mrs. Bonteen had been hovering round the spot on the terrace on which
the Duke and Madame Max Goesler had been standing, looking on with
envious eyes, meditating some attack, some interruption, some excuse
for an interpolation, but her courage had failed her and she had
not dared to approach. The Duke had known nothing of the hovering
propinquity of Mrs. Bonteen, but Madame Goesler had seen and had
understood it all.

"Dear Mrs. Bonteen," she said afterwards, "why did you not come and
join us? The Duke was so pleasant."

"Two is company, and three is none," said Mrs. Bonteen, who in her
anger was hardly able to choose her words quite as well as she might
have done had she been more cool.

"Our friend Madame Max has made quite a new conquest," said Mrs.
Bonteen to Lady Glencora.

"I am so pleased," said Lady Glencora, with apparently unaffected
delight. "It is such a great thing to get anybody to amuse my uncle.
You see everybody cannot talk to him, and he will not talk to
everybody."

"He talked enough to her in all conscience," said Mrs. Bonteen, who
was now more angry than ever.

CHAPTER XLIX

The Duellists Meet

Lord Chiltern arrived, and Phineas was a little nervous as to their
meeting. He came back from shooting on the day in question, and was
told by the servant that Lord Chiltern was in the house. Phineas went
into the billiard-room in his knickerbockers, thinking probably that
he might be there, and then into the drawing-room, and at last into
the library,--but Lord Chiltern was not to be found. At last he came
across Violet.

"Have you seen him?" he asked.

"Yes;--he was with me half an h