“Failure is not permitted,” he was repeating in his soul....

“You’re Cousin Rudolph, aren’t you?” she asked.  “How perfectly entrancing!  You see until to-day I always thought that if I had been offered the choice between having cousins or appendicitis I would have preferred to be operated on.”

And Rudolph Musgrave noted, with a delicious tingling somewhere about his heart, that her hair was really like the reflection of a sunset in rippling waters,—­only many times more beautiful, of course,—­and that her mouth was an inconsiderable trifle, a scrap of sanguine curves, and that her eyes were purple glimpses of infinity.

Then he observed that his own mouth was giving utterance to divers irrelevant and foolish sounds, which eventually resolved themselves into the statement he was glad to see her.  And immediately afterward the banality of this remark brought the hot blood to his face and, for the rest of the day, stung him and teased him, somewhere in the background of his mind, like an incessant insect.

Glad, indeed!

Before he had finished shaking hands with Patricia Stapylton, it was all over with the poor man.

“Er—­h’m!” quoth he.

“Only,” Miss Stapylton was meditating, with puckered brow, “it would be unseemly for me to call you Rudolph—­”

“You impertinent minx!” cried he, in his soul; “I should rather think it would be!”

“—­and Cousin Rudolph sounds exactly like a dried-up little man with eyeglasses and crows’ feet and a gentle nature.  I rather thought you were going to be like that, and I regard it as extremely hospitable of you not to be.  You are more like—­like what now?” Miss Stapylton put her head to one side and considered the contents of her vocabulary,—­“you are like a viking.  I shall call you Olaf,” she announced, when she had reached a decision.

This, look you, to the most dignified man in Lichfield,—­a person who had never borne a nickname in his life.  You must picture for yourself how the colonel stood before her, big, sturdy and blond, and glared down at her, and assured himself that he was very indignant; like Timanthes, the colonel’s biographer prefers to draw a veil before the countenance to which art is unable to do justice.

Then, “I have no admiration for the Northmen,” Rudolph Musgrave declared, stiffly.  “They were a rude and barbarous nation, proverbially addicted to piracy and intemperance.”

“My goodness gracious!” Miss Stapylton observed,—­and now, for the first time, he saw the teeth that were like grains of rice upon a pink rose petal.  Also, he saw dimples.  “And does one mean all that by a viking?”

“The vikings,” he informed her—­and his Library manner had settled upon him now to the very tips of his fingers—­“were pirates.  The word is of Icelandic origin, from vik, the name applied to the small inlets along the coast in which they concealed their galleys.  I may mention that Olaf was not a viking, but a Norwegian king, being the first Christian monarch to reign in Norway.”