I thought, “Invisible among our eighty millions there is a quiet legion living untainted in the depths, while the yellow rich, the prismatic scum and bubbles, boil on the surface.”  Yes, he had accidentally helped me, and I wished doubly that I might help him.  It was well enough he should feel he must not shirk his duty, but how much better if he could be led to see that marrying where he did not love was no duty of his.

I knew what I had to say to him, but lacked the beginning of it; and of this beginning I was in search as we drove up among the live-oaks of Udolpho to the little club-house, or hunting lodge, where a negro and his wife received us, and took the baskets and set about preparing supper.  My beginning sat so heavily upon my attention that I took scant notice of Udolpho as we walked about its adjacent grounds in the twilight before supper, and John Mayrant pointed out to me its fine old trees, its placid stream, and bade me admire the snug character of the hunting lodge, buried away for bachelors’ delights deep in the heart of the pleasant forest.  I heard him indulging in memories and anecdotes of date sittings after long hunts; but I was myself always on a hunt for my beginning, and none of his words clearly reached my intelligence until I was aware of his reciting an excellently pertinent couplet:—­

          “If you would hold your father’s land,
          You must wash your throat before your hand—­”

and found myself standing by the lodge table, upon which he had set two glasses, containing, I soon ascertained, gin, vermouth, orange bitters, and a cherry at the bottom—­all which he had very skillfully mingled himself in the happiest proportions.

“The poetry,” he remarked, “is hereditary in my family;” and setting down the empty glasses we also washed our hands.  A moon half-grown looked in at the window from the filmy darkness, and John, catching sight of it, paused with the wet soap in his hand and stared out at the dimly visible trees.  “Oh, the times, the times!” he murmured to himself, gazing long; and then with a sort of start he returned to the present moment, and rinsed and dried his hands.  Presently we were sitting at the table, pledging each other in well-cooled champagne; and it was not long after this that not only the negro who waited on us was plainly reveling in John’s remarks, but also the cook, with her bandannaed ebony head poked round the corner of the kitchen door, was doing her utmost to lose no word of this entertainment.  For John, taking up the young and the old, the quick and the dead, of masculine Kings Port, proceeded to narrate their private exploits, until by coffee-time he had unrolled for me the richest tapestry of gayeties that I remember, and I sat without breath, tearful and aching, while the two negroes had retired far into the kitchen to muffle their emotions.