28

A CAUTIOUS YOUNG MAN.

is older than I fancied. I thought she would be almost a little girl; younger, at least, than Gracie, and she is certainly not under two or three and twenty!"

"Those sky-coloured eyes of hers mean mischief, ma tante! and if you will accept the advice of one of her Majesty's most devoted servants, meaning my exemplary self, you will keep a keen eye over this fair lady and her proceedings."

"What are you afraid of, Fred ?" asked Ernest, stopping suddenly in the measured promenade he was making from end to end of the long drawing-room."

"She looks as if there was something sub rosá, and a great deal too! She's a kind of girl that means man-traps, as Joey Bagstock said of that inestimable female, Miss Tox; she looks mischief and means it too; and you'll see, most learned and worthy brother mine, that she will do a little execution before she says goodbye to Kingsdown Lodge !"

"And do you fear she will marry you by force; or are you apprehensive of her cheating you into signing a written promise, like that wicked Countess Gruffanuff in the fairy tale you were reading to the little Marshdales the other day ?"

"Not I! I am not Prince Giglio. I am as cautious as Talleyrand! I would not sign my name on a blank page of Grace's album, lest some one should preface it with an inconvenient obligation. No, I am not the man to be magnetised by a pair of blue eyes. I care nothing for affinities, and sympathies, and the rest of the trash that comes from Germany.

I

abominate the Germans. I loathe their habits, I detest their language, and I despise their sentimentalities, as much as I deprecate their metaphysics!"

Ernest and Miss Clayton smiled; for the young soldier was striding about the room, and delivered his opinions in a tone and style that might have suited Julius Cæsar haranguing his troops previous to battle.

Can we not improvise some kind of rostrum ?" said Ernest, archly, laying hands as he spoke on an upright chair of that species said to be devotional. "Fred, if you do not make a great general, you will certainly become a great orator; you are too easily excited to hold pre-eminence in the first character; for see how a pair of mischievous eyes has disturbed your equanimity, to say nothing of the cat who has taken refuge under the sofa till your frenzy shall be calmed; and not to mention Aunt Sarah's knitting which you have twisted round and round your feet, to the serious and, I fear, irretrievable damage of her day's work."

Fred stopped suddenly, looking rather ashamed of the ruin he had so heedlessly caused.

"Never mind, my dear," said Miss Clayton, while she endeavoured to disentangle her luckless ball of cotton from chair legs and table claws, and ascertained, meanwhile, that stitches were dropped to such an extent, that the whole piece had better be unravelled and begun afresh. "Now, my dear boy, I would rather you did not try to help me; you understand triggers and bayonets better than knitting-pins and crochet-hooks."

66 Well! you are the best creature in the world, Aunt Sarah. Most women would have raved and scolded, or else sighed and looked so pitiful that I should have been ready to try if I could not repair the mischief myself; but you and Grace have tempers that will stand ambuscade, sally, grand charge, or regular siege. I hope my wife will be gifted with like evenness of disposition."

"I hope so too," said Ernest.

Why ?" asked Fred, suddenly facing round. "Do you think that a wife of mine will need more than ordinary powers of self-control ?"

66

Ernest nodded. Well," returned Fred, "I don't know but what you are right. I have a genius for plaguing, I know; and the more I love people, the more I torment them, in a certain way; ergo, as of course I shall love my wife above all other terrestrial beings, I shall teaze her ten times more than I ever teazed Grace or Aunt Sarah! But, now to return to Miss Wedderburn, I do not suppose she will think of laying traps for my dear self, unless, indeed, my red coat should dazzle her imagination (and some young ladies are terribly liable to scarlet fever, as I have discovered by special experience, Ernest); but if I mistake not, there's metal more attractive' at Kingsdown Lodge than a harebrained officer, who has only his commission, and what his papa pleases to give him besides."

"If you are anxious on my account, Fred,” replied Ernest, "you may set your mind at rest. In the first place, you have no right to presuppose a case

MR. HAMILTON AT HOME.

31

of husband-hunting: Miss Wedderburn may be engaged for aught we know, and will, perhaps, pay neither of us the slightest regard, save that which is due to us as the gentlemen of the family whom she is visiting; but, placing the matter in the form into which you have so ungallantly thrown it, be assured that I am quite safe. I think I can safely promise you never to bestow Miss Wedderburn upon you as a sister-in-law."

Here the conversation dropped, for no less a personage than Mr. Hamilton himself entered the room. He came in, with his usual leisurely demeanour, but somewhat discomposed at his own absence, when he ought to have been ready to step forward, and receive with due courtesy his daughter's guests. He seemed to bring in with him a great deal of the external cold; for, despite the blazing fire and the steady light of chandeliers, the room apparently lost much of its warmth and brightness. Miss Clayton sank into her accustomed seat, and began to wind her unravelled cotton. Fred subsided into an orderly well-conducted young man; Ernest alone remained in the same attitude, and with the same expression of countenance as before.

With a stiff bow to Miss Clayton and a glance at his sons, Mr. Hamilton walked up to the fire-place and planted himself like a true Englishman on his own hearth. He was rather more than forty-six years of age, tall, nobly-formed, and strikingly handsome; but it needed little discrimination, and scarcely any skill in physiognomy to decide that the master of Kings

32

A SLIGHT TEMPEST.

down Lodge was one whose slightest word was law, whose will was indomitable, and whose feelings, or rather opinions, were cast in the sternest, coldest mould in which human nature can be fashioned. Feelings indeed! emotions! sensibilities! Mr. Hamilton scorned the very idea of such absurdities. He barely tolerated them in women as a necessary consequence of their feeble minds and their imperfect experience; but in men, he loathed, scorned, and mocked at anything which bordered on a refinement to him utterly incomprehensible and extremely undesirable.

In the present instance, his natural sternness was not diminished by a very sensible accession of irritability. He had been detained; he had been annoyed; for Mr. Hamilton, tyrant as he was in his own house, and above all in his own place of business, found that men existed in the commercial world who cared no more for his business and his marble coldness, than if he had been a poor errand boy with his foot on the very lowest verge of fortune's ladder. Such encounters always chafed him, and now he was decidedly in that objectionable state of mind which we graphically call, being in a temper. His sons and his aunt, therefore, maintained a respectful silence, congratulating themselves meanwhile, that the presence of guests would prevent anything like a protracted display of discon

tent.

There was a brief squall, however; the clouds were too heavy to roll away without a slight sprinkling, and a few mutterings of distant thunder.