“Morpheus may have remained shut up in his cavern, but Cupid is a wanderer by night, who does not need a lantern to find the way to those fortunate individuals he favours with a visit,” Leander replied, hoping to divert attention from the tell-tale bruises, that he had fancied were successfully concealed.

“I am only a humble valet, and have had no experience in affairs of gallantry.  I never paid court to a fine lady in my life; but still, I do know this much, that the mischievous little god, Cupid, according to all the poets, aims his arrows at the hearts of those he wishes to wound, instead of using his bow upon their backs.”

“What in the world do you mean?” Leander interrupted quickly, growing seriously uneasy at the turn the conversation was taking.

“Oh! nothing; only that I see, in spite of all your efforts to hide it with that handkerchief knotted so carefully round your neck, that you have there on the back of it a long, black mark, which to-morrow will be indigo, the day after green, and then yellow, until it fades away altogether, like any other bruise—­a black mark that looks devilishly like the authentic flourish which accompanies the signature of a good, stout club on a calf’s skin—­or on vellum, if that term pleases you better.”

“Ah! my good Scapin, you do not understand such matters,” Leander replied, a scarlet flush mounting to the very roots of his hair, and at his wits’ ends to know how to silence his tormentor; “doubtless some dead and gone beauty, who loved me passionately during her lifetime, has come back and kissed me there while I was sleeping; as is well known, the contact of the lips of the dead leave strange, dark marks, like bruises, on human flesh, which the recipient of the mysterious caress is astonished to find upon awaking.”

“Your defunct beauty visited you and bestowed her mysterious caress very apropos,” remarked Scapin, incredulously; “but I would be willing to take my oath that yonder vigorous kiss had been imprinted upon your lily-white neck by the stinging contact of a stout club.”

“Unmannerly jester and scoffer that you are! is nothing sacred to you?” broke in Leander, with some show of heat.

“You push my modesty too far.  I endeavoured delicately to put off upon a dead beauty what I should have ascribed to a living one.  Ignorant and unsophisticated though you claim to be, have you never heard of kisses so ardent that such traces of them are left?—­where pearly teeth have closed upon the soft flesh, and made their mark on the white skin?”

“Memorem dente notam,” interrupted the pedant, charmed to have a chance to quote Horace.

“This explanation appears to me very judicious,” Scapin said; then, with a low bow to the pedant, “and is sustained by unquestionable if incomprehensible authority; but the mark is so long that this nocturnal beauty of yours, dead or alive, must have had in her lovely mouth that famous tooth which the three Gorgon sisters owned among them, and passed about from one to the other.”