he could ever have regarded her in that light of
marriage. "Who was her father, the Judge?" he used to reflect. The
Judge was a favorite topic with Mrs. Basil at the table.

"Mr. Reybold," she would say, "you commercial people of the Nawth
can't hunt, I believe. Jedge Basil is now on the mountains of Fawquear
hunting the plova. His grandfather's estate is full of plova."

If, by chance, Reybold saw a look of care on Mrs. Basil's face, he
inquired for the Judge, her husband, and found he was still shooting
on the Occequan.

"Does he never come to Washington, Mrs. Basil?" asked Reybold one day,
when his mind was very full of Joyce, the daughter.

"Not while Congress is in session," said Mrs. Basil. "It's a little
too much of the _oi polloi_ for the Judge. His family, you may not
know, Mr. Reybold, air of the Basils of King George. They married into
the Tayloze of Mount Snaffle. The Tayloze of Mount Snaffle have Ingin
blood in their veins--the blood of Poky-huntus. They dropped the name
of Taylor, which had got to be common through a want of Ingin blood,
and spelled it with a E. It used to be Taylor, but now it's Tayloze."

On another occasion, at sight of Joyce Basil cooking over the fire,
against whose flame her moulded arms took momentary roses upon their
ivory, Reybold said to himself: "Surely there is something above the
common in the race of this girl." And he asked the question of Mrs.
Basil:

"Madame, how was the Judge, your husband, at the last advices?"

"Hunting the snipe, Mr. Reybold. I suppose you do not have the snipe
in the North. It is the aristocratic fowl of the Old Dominion. Its
bill is only shorter than its legs, and it will not brown at the fire,
to perfection, unless upon a silver spit. Ah! when the Jedge and
myself were young, before his land troubles overtook us, we went to
the springs with our own silver and carriages, Mr. Reybold."

Looking up at Mrs. Basil, Reybold noticed a pallor and flush
alternately, and she evaded his eye.

Once Mrs. Basil borrowed a hundred dollars from Reybold in advance of
board, and the table suffered in consequence.

"The Judge," she had explained, "is short of taxes on his Fawquear
lands. It's a desperate moment with him." Yet in two days the Judge
was shooting blue-winged teal at the mouth of the Accotink, and his
entire indifference to his family set Reybold to thinking whether the
Virginia husband and father was any thing more than a forgetful
savage. Th