evertheless."

"Stuff! An attractive girl can't make herself ugly or disagreeable, or
erect a brick wall round herself, with iron spikes on the top, for fear,
through looking at her, any fellow might come to grief. The men followed
her, and she couldn't help that."

"And she encouraged them, and she _could_ help that. However, I don't
wish to speak against her; it's nothing to me how she kills and slays,
provided I'm not among the bag. Take care you don't get shot yourself,
Ned."

"Keep your counsel for your own use, Syd. You put me in mind of the
philanthropist, who ran to warn his neighbor of the dangers of soot
while his own chimney was on fire."

"As how? I don't quite see the point of your parable," said Vivian, with
an expression of such innocent impassiveness that one would have thought
he had never seen her fair face out of her furs in her sledge, or
admired her small ankles when she was skating on the Ontario.

The winter before, a brother of mine, who was out there in the Rifles,
wrote and asked me to go and have some buffalo-hunting, and Vivian went
out with me for a couple of months. We had some very good sport in the
western woods and plains, and his elk and bison horns are still stuck up
in Vivian's rooms at Uxbridge, with many another trophy of both
hemispheres. We had sport of another kind, too, to the merry music of
the silvery sledge-bells, over the crisp snow and the gleaming ice,
while bright eyes shone on us under delicate lace veils, and little feet
peeped from under heaps of sable and bearskin, and gay voices rang out
in would-be fear when the horses shied at the shadow of themselves, or
at the moon shining on the ice. Who thinks of Canada without in fancy
hearing the ringing chimes of the gay sledge bells swinging joyous
measure into the clear sunshine or the white moonlight, in tune with
light laughter, and soft whispers, and careless hearts?

There we saw Cecil St. Aubyn, one of the prettiest girls in Toronto,
then about nineteen. My brother Harry was mad about her, so were almost
all the men in the Canada Rifles, and Engineers, and, 61st that were
quartered there; and Vivian admired her too, though in a calmer sort of
way. Perhaps if he had been with her more than a fortnight he might have
gone further. As it was, he left Toronto liking her long Canadian eyes
no more than was pleasant. It was as well so, perhaps, for it would not
have been a good match for him, St. Aubyn being a broken-d