of it. The bronzed, weather worn face of Telford showed
imperturbable, but his eyes were struggling with a strong kind of humor.
The officer flushed to the hair, accepted the grapes, smiled foolishly,
and acknowledged--swallowing the reflection on his accent--that he had
been in Paris. Then he engaged in close conversation with the young lady
beside him, who, however, seemed occupied with Telford. This quiet, keen
young lady, Miss Mildred Margrave, had received an impression, not of the
kind which her sex confide to each other, but of a graver quality. She
was a girl of sympathies and parts.

The event increased the interest and respect felt in the hotel for this
stranger. That he knew French was not strange. He had been well educated
as a boy and had had his hour with the classics. His godmother, who had
been in the household of Prince Joseph Bonaparte, taught him French from
the time he could lisp, and, what was dangerous in his father's eyes,
filled him with bits of poetry and fine language, so that he knew Heine,
Racine and Beranger and many another. But this was made endurable to the
father by the fact that, by nature, the boy was a warrior and a
scapegrace, could use his fists as well as his tongue, and posed as a
Napoleon with the negro children in the plantation. He was leader of the
revels when the slaves gathered at night in front of the huts and made a
joy of captivity and sang hymns which sounded like profane music hall
songs, and songs with an unction now lost to the world, even as
Shakespeare's fools are lost--that gallant company who ran a thread of
tragedy through all their jesting.

Great things had been prophesied for this youth in the days when he sat
upon an empty treacle barrel with a long willow rod in his hand, a cocked
hat on his head, a sword at his side--a real sword once belonging to a
little Bonaparte--and fiddlers and banjoists beneath him. His father on
such occasions called him Young King Cole.

All had changed, and many things had happened, as we shall see. But one
thing was clear--this was no wild man from the west. He had claims to be
considered, and he was considered. People watched him as he went down over
the esplanade and into quiet streets. The little occurrence at the dinner
table had set him upon a train of thoughts which he had tried to avoid for
many years. On principle he would not dwell on the past. There was no
corrosion, he said to himself, like the memory of an ugly deed