ht.'

'But you stay in England now?' Nataly's voice wavered on the question.

'There's a chance of my being off to Upper Burmah before the week's
ended.'

'Ah, dear, dear!' sighed Fenellan; 'and out of good comes evil!--as
grandfather Deucalion exclaimed, when he gallantly handed up his
dripping wife from the mud of the Deluge waters. Do you mean to be
running and Dewing it on for ever, with only a nod for friends, Dart?'

'Lord, Simmy, what a sound of home there is in your old nonsense!'
Dartrey said.

His eyes of strong dark blue colour and the foreign swarthiness of his
brows and cheeks and neck mixed the familiar and the strange, in the
sight of the women who knew him.

The bill-broker's fair-tressed young wife whispered of curiosity
concerning him to Nataly. He dressed like a sailor, he stood like a
soldier: and was he married? Yes, he was married.

Mrs. Blathenoy imagined a something in Mrs. Radnor's tone. She could
account for it; not by the ordinary reading of the feminine in the
feminine, but through a husband who professed to know secrets. She
was young in years and experience, ten months wedded, disappointedly
awakened, enlivened by the hour, kindled by a novel figure of man,
fretful for a dash of imprudence. This Mrs. Radnor should be the one to
second her very innocent turn for a galopade; her own position allowed
of any little diverting jig or reel, or plunge in a bath--she required
it, for the domestic Jacob Blathenoy was a dry chip: proved such,
without a day's variation during the whole of the ten wedded months.
Nataly gratified her spoken wish. Dartrey Fenellan bowed to the lady,
and she withdrew him, seeing composedly that other and greater ladies
had the wish ungratified. Their husbands were not so rich as hers, and
their complexions would hardly have pleased the handsome brown-faced
officer so well.

Banquet, equal to a blast of trumpet, was the detaining word for the
multitude. It circulated, one knows not how. Eloquent as the whiffs to
the sniffs (and nowhere is eloquence to match it, when the latter are
sharpened from within to without), the word was very soon over the
field. Mr. Carling may have helped; he had it from Fenellan; and he
was among the principal groups, claiming or making acquaintances, as a
lawyer should do. The Concert was complimentarily a topic: Durandarte
divine!--did not everybody think so? Everybody did, in default of a term
for overtopping it. Our language is poor