CHAPTER IX.

LOVE IN THE FIRST DEGREE.

Peter Skerrett came sailing round the purple rocks of his Point, skating like a man who has been in the South of Europe for two winters.

He was decidedly Anglicized in his whiskers, coat, and shoes.  Otherwise he in all respects repeated his well-known ancestor, Skerrett of the Revolution; whose two portraits—­1.  A ruddy hero in regimentals, in Gilbert Stuart’s early brandy-and-water manner; 2.  A rosy sage in senatorials, in Stuart’s later claret-and-water manner—­hang in his descendant’s dining-room.

Peter’s first look was a provokingly significant one at the confused and blushing young lady.  Secondly he inspected the Dying Gladiator on the ice.

“Have you been tilting at this gentleman, Mary?” he asked, in the voice of a cheerful, friendly fellow.  “Why!  Hullo.  Hooray!  It’s Wade, Richard Wade, Dick Wade!  Don’t look, Miss Mary, while I give him the grips of all the secret societies we belonged to in College.”

Mary, however, did look on, pleased and amused, while Peter plumped down on the ice, shook his friend’s hand, and examined him as if he were fine crockery, spilt and perhaps shattered.

“It’s not a case of trepanning, Dick, my boy?” said he.

“No,” said the other.  “I tumbled in trying to dodge this lady.  The ice thought my face ought to be scratched, because I had been scratching its face without mercy.  My wits were knocked out of me; but they are tired of secession, and pleading to be let in again.”

“Keep some of them out for our sake!  We must have you at our commonplace level.  Well, Miss Mary, I suppose this is the first time you have had the sensation of breaking a man’s head.  You generally hit lower.”  Peter tapped his heart.

“I’m all right now, thanks to my surgeon,” says Wade.  “Give me a lift, Peter.”  He pulled up and clung to his friend.

“You’re the vine and I’m the lamppost,” Skerrett said.  “Mary, do you know what a pocket-pistol is?”

“I have seen such weapons concealed about the persons of modern warriors.”

“There’s one in my overcoat-pocket, with a cup at the butt and a cork at the muzzle.  Skate off now, like an angel, and get it.  Bring Fanny, too.  She is restorative.”

“Are you alive enough to admire that, Dick?” he continued, as she skimmed away.

“It would pat a soul under the ribs of Death.”

“I venerate that young woman,” says Peter.  “You see what a beauty she is, and just as unspoiled as this ice.  Unspoiled beauties are rarer than rocs’ eggs.

“She has a singularly true face,” Wade replied, “and that is the main thing,—­the most excellent thing in man or woman.”

“Yes, truth makes that nuisance, beauty, tolerable.”

“You did not do me the honor to present me.”

“I saw you had gone a great way beyond that, my boy.  Have you not her initials in cambric on your brow?  Not M. T., which wouldn’t apply; but M. D.”