“I shouldn’t wonder if he did,” said Scoutbush; “two to one on his baulking the plunger!”

“She is at Lord ——­’s now, at those silly private theatricals.  Is he there?”

“No,” said Mellot; “he tried hard for an invitation—­stooped to work me and Sabina.  I believe she told him that she would sooner see him in the Morgue than help him; and he is gone to the moors now, I believe.”

“There is time then:  I will write to her to-night;” and Campbell took up his hat and went home to do it.

“Ah,” said Scoutbush, taking his cigar meditatively from his mouth, “I wonder how he does it!  It’s a gift, I always say, a wonderful gift!  Before he has been a week in a house, he’ll have the confidence of every woman in it,—­and ’gad, he does it by saying the rudest things!—­and the confidence of all the youngsters the week after.”

“A somewhat dangerous gift,” said Elsley, drily.

“Ah, yes; he might play tricks if he chose:  but there’s the wonder, that he don’t.  I’d answer for him with my own sister.  I do every day of my life—­for I believe he knows how many pins she puts into her dress—­and yet there he is.  As I said once in the mess-room—­there was a youngster there who took on himself to be witty, and talked about the still sow supping the milk—­the snob!  You recollect him, Mellot? the attorney’s son from Brompton, who sold out;—­we shaved his mustachios, put a bear in his bed, and sent him home to his ma—­And he said that Major Campbell might be very pious, and all that:  but he’d warrant—­they were the fellow’s own words,—­that he took his lark on the sly, like other men—­ the snob! so I told him, I was no better than the rest, and no more I am; but if any man dared to say that the Major was not as honest as his own sister, I was his man at fifteen paces.  And so I am, Claude!”

All which did not increase Elsley’s love to the Major, conscious as he was that Lucia’s confidence was a thing which he had not wholly; and which it would be very dangerous to him for any other man to have at all.

Into the drawing-room they went.  Frank Headley had been asked up to tea; and he stood at the piano, listening to Valencia’s singing.

As they came in, the maid came in also.  “Mr. Thurnall wished to speak to Major Campbell.”

Campbell went out, and returned in two minutes somewhat hurriedly.

“Mr. Thurnall wishes Lord Scoutbush to be informed at once, and I think it is better that you should all know it—­that—­it is a painful surprise:—­but there is a man ill in the street, whose symptoms he does not like, he says.”

“Cholera?” said Elsley.

“Call him in,” said Scoutbush.

“He had rather not come in, he says.”

“What! is it infectious?”

“Certainly not, if it be cholera, but—­”

“He don’t wish to frighten people, quite right:”  (with a half glance at
Elsley;) “but is it cholera, honestly?”