A
LITTLE AVERSION.

After this split, Telfer and the Tressillian were rather further off
each other than before; and whenever riding, and driving, at dinner, or
in lionizing, they came by chance together, he avoided her silently as
much as ever he could, without making a parade of it. Violet could see
very well how cordially he hated her, and, woman-like, I dare say mine,
and Edenburgh's, and Walsham's, and all her devoted friends' admiration
was valueless, as long as her vowed enemy treated her with such careless
contempt.

One morning the two foes met by chance. Telfer and I, after a late night
over at Pipesandbeersbad, with lansquenet, cheroots, and cognac, had
betaken ourselves out to whip the Beersbad, whose fish, for all their
boiling by the hot springs, are first-rate, I can assure you. Telfer
tells you he likes fishing, but I never see that he does much more than
lie full length under the shadiest tree he can find, with his cap over
his eyes and his cigar in his mouth, doing the _dolce_ lazily enough. A
three-pound trout had no power to rouse him; and he's lost a salmon
before now in the Tweed because it bored him to play it! Shade of old
Izaak! is _that_ liking fishing? But few things ever did excite him,
except it was a charge, or a Kaffir scrimmage; and then he looked more
like a concentrated tempest than anything else, and woe to the turban
that his sabre came down upon.

That part of the stream we'd tried first had been whipped before us, or
the fish wouldn't bite; and I, who haven't as much patience as I might
have, went up higher to try my luck. Telfer declined to come; he was
comfortable, he said, and out of the sun; he preferred "Indiana" and his
cheroot to catching all the fish in the Beersbad, so I bid him good-bye,
and left him smoking and reading at his leisure under the linden-trees.
I went further on than I had meant, up round a bend of the river, and
was too absorbed in filling my basket to notice a storm coming up from
the west, till I began to find myself getting wet to the skin, and the
lightning flying up and down the hills round Essellau. I looked for the
Major as I passed the lime-trees, but he wasn't there, and I made the
best of my way back to the castle, supposing he'd got there before me;
but I was mistaken.

"I've seen nothing of him," said Marc. "He's stalking about the woods, I
dare say, admiring the lightning. That's more than the poor Tressillian
does, I bet. She went out b