lovers know, such pangs as Hamlet felt in his uncertainty
regarding the integrity of his mother.

Within a week after the Morris ball, it came to pass that Captain
Falconer was quartered, by regular orders, in the house of Mr.
Faringfield. Tom and I, though we only looked our thoughts, saw more
than accident in this. The officer occupied the large parlour, which
he divided by curtains into two apartments, sitting-room and
sleeping-chamber. By his courtesy and vivacity, he speedily won the
regard of the family, even of Mr. Faringfield and the Rev. Mr.
Cornelius.

"Damn the fellow!" said Tom to me. "I can't help liking him."

"Nor I, either," was my reply; but I also damned him in my turn.

CHAPTER X.

_A Fine Project._

Were it my own history that I am here undertaking, I should give at
this place an account of my first duel, which was fought with swords,
in Bayard's Woods, my opponent being an English lieutenant of foot,
from whom I had suffered a display of that superciliousness which our
provincial troops had so resented in the British regulars in the old
French War. By good luck I disarmed the man without our receiving more
than a small scratch apiece; and subsequently brought him to the
humbleness of a fawning spaniel, by a mien and tone of half-threatening
superiority which never fail of reducing such high-talking sparks to
abject meekness. 'Twas a trick of pretended bullying, which we
long-suffering Americans were driven to adopt in self-defence against
certain derisive, contemptuous praters that came to our shores from
Europe. But 'tis more to my purpose, as the biographer of Philip
Winwood, to continue upon the subject of Captain Falconer.

He was the mirror of elegance, with none of the exaggerations of a
fop. He brought with him to the Queen Street house the atmosphere of
Bond Street and Pall Mall, the perfume of Almack's and the assembly
rooms, the air of White's and the clubs, the odour of the chocolate
houses and the fashionable taverns. 'Twas all that he represented, I
fancy, rather than what the man himself was, and conquering as he was,
that caught Margaret's eye. He typified the world before which she had
hoped to shine, and from which she had been debarred--cruelly
debarred, it may have seemed to her. I did not see this then; 'twas
another, one of a broader way of viewing things, one of a less partial
imagination--'twas Philip Winwood--that found this excuse for her.

Captain Falcone