dance with all comers. The delicacy of Alicia
Mary's chest was quite a different sort of thing.
In this narrow little paddock "Lady Laura
Fermor" was said to be quite an addition. She
at once had the freedom of every drawing-room
presented to her. She took, almost as a matter
of right, the fowling over those moors.

Afar off her wary eyes had already marked
down something stirring in the underwood.
She came, not unprovided with reliable information.
She knew of some young and noble chests
that were "threatened," and, as she had
anticipated, found young Gulliver and Lord Spandril,
yet younger and more tender in years, already in
this happy sanatorium. Those youths idolised
the valse and the wilder galop, and Alicia Mary
and Blanche ambled round in those measures
with singular grace and agility.

It was a surprise to meet these young men
so far away, in one of the little narrow chambers
where the Nice festivals were given. A few of
the colony—the Welbore Cravens, the Browns,
the Selwyns, and a delightful French family, the
Marquis la Motte-Terray, whom all the select
English knew—" saw each other" a good deal,
and gave each other reciprocal dances.

"Ah! that winter we spent at Nice!" said
Major Brown, a couple of years later. " You
remember, Fanny? The nice little parties we
gave to each other. No scandalous waste in
suppers, and music, and tumbling the house out
of windows, as we do in this absurd country.
You stuck a few wax candles about, and
squeezed a dozen of lemons, and the thing was
done. We went from one house to another.
' Sir, you have me to-night, and I have you
tomorrow night.' The prettiest girls came to us,
and how they enjoyed themselves. You recollect
that young La Motte-What's-his-name,
when he got up the cotillon at our house?"

This style of entertainment suited Lady Laura
Fermor' s taste exactly. She called it " rational
enjoyment," and she carried out the total abstinence
principle even further than her neighbours.
As conquerors make war support war,
so she made dances support dances, and guests
support guests. She artfully went round " drawing
the line," exposing plaintively unworthy
intrigues that had been set on foot to break into
her select pleasure-grounds, and actually
succeeded in setting an artificial value on her little
cheap " drums." People struggled to get
admission to those little hot rooms, and Alicia Mary,
Blanche, and Laura junior, were contended for
with animation. As they drifted of a night into
one of these festive cabins, with their indomitable
parent in the front of the little procession,
young Gulliver and the younger Spandril came
swooping down on them, eager to secure them,
both showing signs of excessive heat. In
those youths, indeed, they exercised a sort of
proprietorship: with them they exchanged
glances of intelligence and signiticant words.
At their humorous sallies—and sometimes they
gambolled before them in the Ethiopian manner
—the sisters Fermor were convulsed; their
sense of the humour of the exhibition contending
with an attempt at grave reproof. Lady
Laura, true and faithful night after night, got
into her uniform and went on duty in the
trenches, and, all through wet and exposure,
exhaustion and fatigue, never once failed; never
would fail unto the end; and when her hour
came, would surely be found at her post,
apparently sleeping, having at last found rest, and
grasping her fan as it might be her firelock.

Later on she was felling friends how she was
expecting her relative, Sir Hopkins Pocock,
C.B., late governor of certain colonies—Prince
Rupert's Island it might have been—a gentleman
whose profession was Governing, and who
was now moving round pleasantly from one
Governing station to the other. He was not
unknown, for it was he who, after long and harassing
boundary wars, had concluded the famous
treaty with the Waipiti tribe. Before this
diplomatic triumph he had been in the Indies,
and was said to have collected enormous wealth.
Waiting now till he should begin Governing
again—and there was to be a vacancy in a few
months—he was coming to Nice for some trifling
repairs.

CHAPTER XXIV. A DIPLOMATIST.

LADY LAURA had discounted him in advance.
At languid little teas, at the furious Dervish
dances of Major Brown, she menaced them
with her relative, flourished him in the air,
brought him down on them at intervals like the
lash of a whip. Finally, at one of the little
parties specially organised for the purpose, she
discharged him among them as if he were a
cartridge. As may be conceived, the union of two
such first-class powers was irresistible, and
seriously disturbed the balance of power in the
colony.

On which, select persons were taken into
custody, as it were, and led off to be introduced
to "my relative," Sir Hopkins Pocock, aud
found themselves bowing before an exceeding
tight and clean-made little man, whose
clothes were dapper and clean-made too, and
rather spare as to their material, so as to give
no undue advantage to diplomatists on the
other side. He had a round pink head, pierced
for two small twinkling eyes; cheeks, lips, chin,
aud throat, shaven away right and left, as if,
again, to leave nothing that could afford a ready
purchase to the opposing diplomatist. He had
a thiu layer of iron-grey hair on his head; but
if tonsures were at all in fashion, he would have
seized on the least pretext to have laid out his
head in a sort of pond or ornamental water of
baldness. Failing this, he was obliged to
content himself with a general air of perkiness, and
succeeded in easily throwing an air of perk into
his nose, into his chin, and with more difficulty
into the front portion of his lips, which he
brought to regular points.

He had a marvellous fluency, and five minutes
after the company had assembled, his talking
was trickling smoothly over two or three
gentlemen on the rug, like oil from the thin spout of
an engine-driver's can. There was no interruption