o, I 'll be a duchess; you sha'n't cheat me out of my just claims."

"Will your Grace please to give orders about packing up, for we must be
away soon after one o'clock," said he, laughing.

"If I were not humility itself, I'd say the train should await my
convenience," said she, as she left the room with a proud and graceful
dignity that would have become a queen.

For a few moments Beecher sat silent and thoughtful in his chair, and
then burst out into a fit of immoderate laughing,--he laughed till his
eyes ran over and his sides ached. "If this ain't going the pace, I 'd
like to know what speed is!" cried he, aloud. "I wonder what old Grog
would say if he heard her; and the best of the joke is, she is serious
all the while. She is in the most perfect good faith about it all. And
this comes of the absurdity of educating her out of her class. What a
strange blunder for so clever a head to make! You might have guessed,
Master Grog, that she never could be a 'plater.' Let her only enter for
a grand match, and she 'll be 'scratched' from one end of England to the
other. Ay, Davis, my boy, you fancy pedigrees are only cared for on the
turf; but there _is_ a Racing Calendar, edited by a certain Debrett,
that you never heard of."

Again, he thought of Davis as a peer,--"Viscount Davis!" Baron Grog,
as he muttered it, came across him, and he burst out once more into
laughter; then suddenly checking himself, he said, "I must take right
good care, though, that he never hears of this same conversation; he's
just the fellow to say _I_ led her on to laugh at and ridicule him;
he 'd suspect in a moment that I took her that pleasant gallop,--and if
he did--" A long, wailing whistle finished the sentence for him.

Other and not very agreeable reflections succeeded these. It was this
very morning that he himself had determined on "levanting," and there
he was, more securely moored than ever. He looked at his watch, and
muttered, "Eleven o'clock; by this time I should have been at Verviers,
and on the Rhine before midnight. In four days more, I 'd have had the
Alps between us, and now here I am without the chance of escape; for if
I bolted and left his daughter here, he'd follow me through the world to
shoot me!"

He sat silent for some minutes, and then, suddenly springing up from his
chair, he cried out,--

"Precious hard luck it is! but I can neither get on _with_ this fellow
nor _without_ him;" and with this "summing up" he