give him Gibraltar or
Malta, or command of one of our military districts. The South-eastern
'll be vacant soon. He'd like to be Constable of the Castle, and have an
eye on France."

"I think he's fond of the French?"

"Loves the French. Expects to have to fight them all the same. He loves
his country best. Here's the man everybody's abusing!"

"I demur, my lady. I was dining the other day with a client of mine, and
a youngster was present who spoke of Lord Ormont in a way I should like
you to have heard. He seemed to know the whole of Lord Ormont's career,
from the time of the ride to Paraguay up to the capture of the plotting
Rajah. He carried the table."

"Good boy! We must turn to the boys for justice, then. Name your day for
this man, this editor."

"I will see him. You shall have the day to-night."

Lady Charlotte and the editor met. She was racy, he anecdotal. Stag,
fox, and hare ran before them, over fields and through drawing-rooms:
the scent was rich. They found that they could talk to one another
as they thought; that he was not the Isle-bound burgess, nor she the
postured English great lady; and they exchanged salt, without which your
current scandal is of exhausted savour. They enjoyed the peculiar novel
relish of it, coming from a social pressman and a dame of high society.
The different hemispheres became known as one sphere to these birds of
broad wing convening in the upper blue above a quartered carcase earth.

A week later a letter, the envelope of a bulky letter in Lord Ormont's
handwriting, reached Lady Charlotte. There was a line from the editor:

"Would it please your ladyship to have this printed?"

She read the letter, and replied:

"Come to me for six days; you shall have the best mount in the
county."

An editor devoid of malice might probably have forborne to print a
letter that appealed to Lady Charlotte, or touched her sensations, as
if a glimpse of the moon, on the homeward ride in winter on a nodding
horse, had suddenly bared to view a precipitous quarry within two steps.
There is no knowing: few men can forbear to tell a spicy story of
their friends; and an editor, to whom an exhibition of the immensely
preposterous on the part of one writing arrogantly must be provocative,
would feel the interests of his Journal, not to speak of the claims
of readers, pluck at him when he meditated the consignment of such a
precious composition to extinction. Lady Charlotte withhel