yet with grace, for some purpose of his own,
struggling with him in a sham of contest, and
finally, as it were, letting him have his way, and
plunge off in a dignified canter. All this Young
Brett saw, as he had seen many such kindred
scenes, with a sort of aching. He pined with a
boyish pining for ladies' company, and longed to
play at drawing-room knighthood and social
jousts.

Manuel— the gossips told each other—had been
a quasi Anglo-Spanish merchant, who had lived
years at Cadiz, and had married a Spanish woman.
Wine was his divinity, and in that faith he had
lived and died, sending home butts and casks
every week. To the figures that flitted round in
the little watering-place, this meagre detail had
travelled, and, meagre as it was, no one knew how
it had been found out. Still, it was welcome as
far as it went. And one more skilful discoverer
than the rest was able to point to some cloud or
mystery, which hung between them and Mr.
Manuel's end. For it was ascertained that the
butts and casks had broken up suddenly, and in
that deluge, the merchant had disappeared. In
short, there was a story and mystery, or there
should be a story and mystery, which, being
unresolved, caused much torture and suffering in
the neighbourhood. Public interest in their
regard was the more inflamed by the jealous
reserve they maintained in their plaster-covered
little castle on Raglan-terrace. The whole colony
struggled to know them, men made violent efforts
to pour in and carry an acquaintance by assault,
but ineffectually. Only Mr. John Hanbury, who
rode the admired horse, had found some breach
through which he had stolen in.

It seemed natural enough to those who knew
him well; for he was penetrated through and
through with a blunt gentleness and simplicity
which, of all characters in daily currency, is the
most acceptable, and even superficially makes
the most way. The plated artificial world likes
this sort of nature, and inhales it as it does a sea
breeze at Brighton. He had been in India in
some civil station, had broken down physically,
and had come home, thirty-eight years old, with six
feet of height, broad shoulders, a square, rather
massive face, a large kindly eye, black glossy
hair, and a black moustache as glossy. He
delighted in sport, had some dozen guns or so with
which he had shot the tiger and the elephant,
and respected the character of a brave and
upright horse pretty much as he did that of an
upright Christian. He spoke with an earnestness
verging upon dignity, and for him the buffoonery
argot, called chaff, nursery language of
witlings, was hopelessly unintelligible.

The admired horse Baron ambled up to
Raglan-terrace very often, nearly every day. Its
rider and owner came yet more often. The dust-
men and dust-women of gossip, who went about
with baskets on their shoulders and a hook, picking
up old torn shreds and scraps and tossing
them into their baskets, met the party often on
the roads and cliffs. It was given out officially,
as it were, that a marriage must follow; and the
eagerness for original details as to the Manuels'
history became almost exquisite. Any damaging
scraps of whisper about their early days would
be most precious now.

Captain Fermor, who spent a great deal of his
day in a miserable listlessness, lounging along
the roads, but most of all sitting on a low wall
by the roadside in the sun, busy with a blunt
stunted meerschaum, and swinging his legs like
pendulums—like a polite Crusoe cast adrift on
this savage district—strange to say, took a greater
interest in these ladies than he had acknowledged
to his friend Young Brett. He had got to be fond
of his wall, and swung his feet pretty much about
the same hour each day. He had come to know
the sisters thoroughly, their walk even half a mile
away, their favourite bonnets, their clothes. He
really admired "that second girl," and the sleepy
dreamy languor of her eyes, and he half indulged
himself in a speculation how, with proper dressing
and training, under good masters of fashion,
"that girl" might "do" up in Town. But he
soon checked himself, almost with a blush, for
this heresy—as if anything good could come out
of barren provincialism.

The two girls tripping past—and they stepped
together as sisters do, with the harmony of well-
trained ponies—soon came to know the fair
officer who swung his limbs upon the wall, quite
as well as he knew them. At first they did not
know his name, but this someway reached them
in time. There are plenty of such surface
intimacies. As they walked past they dropped
their eyes with a modest precision, but there was
a forced composure about their faces that looked
like consciousness. Captain Fermor suspended
the pendulum motion, and looked long after them
witli tranquil approval.

By-and-by when Mr. Hanbury walked by with
them very often, this expression changed. Man
does not relish familiarity in man, with any of the
other sex. It seems a sort of preference after
rivalry; and though this view is really absurd,
and based upon a fiction, it operates very largely.
So at first Captain Fermor's lip used to curl
contemptuously, as who should say, "A fellow like
that!" Then he grew more hostile, and as one
day, Hanbury full of smiles, was stooping well
across the sisters, as he walked, in his eagerness
in what he told, and as they listened with
smiles and an interest that showed clearly they
had taken no note of the captain upon his wall,
the latter broke out almost loudly with "A low
cad of a fellow!" Though why cad, and why
low, there was no reason for pronouncing. Nay,
he took this prejudice actually away with him
from his wall; and when some one was criticising
(a little unfairly) the riding of Mr. Hanbury,
Captain Fermor joined in with a light growl, and
repeated his censure that he was "a cad of a
fellow!" So, as there are surface intimacies among
people who are never to know each others' minds,
so are there these surface animosities.

What irritated the captain specially was the