d his wits
clear and ordered them off, plainly remembering not for a moment that
his brocades and laces lay hid among the trees, and he stood among them
as Apollo stands in marble.

"Bring brandy," he commanded the nearest. "Stand back; strip his
clothes from him and empty the water from his stomach. Here," to a
matron who had come up panting, "take his wife away."

The good woman he addressed dropped a hurried curtsey and hustled off
the woman under her wing. She led them into the sun and wrung the water
from their garments, while they sobbed and choked and wept.

"Hush thee, wench!" she said to the stricken bride. "Hush thee, little
fool; my lord Marquess will put life into him and set him on his feet
before thy petticoats are dry, Lord! Lord! what a young man! When built
Heaven such another? And he a Duke's son!"

"A Marquess!" cried one of the bride's friends. "A Duke's son!" sobbed
the bride.

"Ay, a Duke's son!" the good woman cried, exulting further. "And were
he a King's, the nation might be proud of him. 'Tis his young lordship
the Marquess of Roxholm."

_CHAPTER VI_

"_No; She has not yet Come to Court_"

'Tis but a small adventure for a youth who is a strong swimmer to save
a party of cits from drowning in a river, but 'twas a story much
repeated, having a picturesqueness and colour because its chief figure
Nature had fitted out with all the appointments which might be expected
to adorn a hero.

"'Tis a pretty story, too," said a laughing great lady when 'twas
talked of in town. "My lord Marquess dashing in and out of the river,
bearing in his big white arms soused little citizen beauties and their
half-drowned sweethearts, and towering in their midst giving
orders--like a tall young god in marble come to life. The handsomest
Marquess in Great Britain, and in France likewise, they tell me."

"The handsomest man," quoth the old Dowager Lady Storms, who had a
country seat in Oxfordshire and knew more of the tale than any one
else. "The handsomest man, say I, for it chanced that I drove by the
river at that moment and saw him."

And then--freedom of speech being the fashion in those days and she an
old woman--she painted such a picture of his fine looks, his broad
shoulders, and the markings of his muscles under his polished skin, as,
being repeated and spread abroad, as gossip will spread itself, fixed
him in the minds of admirers of manly beauty and built him a reputation
in the world of